


Kotimaa

by CyanideBreathmint



Series: even honey bees [4]
Category: Ghost in the Shell (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Car Porn, Competence Porn, Existential Angst, Gen, Gun porn, Procedural porn, Suit Porn, we return to our daily scheduled navel gazing extreme sport edition
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-28 03:14:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30133149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: It has been two months since the Major resigned from Section 9, and Proto is left with new responsibilities as the Chief expands the ranks and reorganizes in her absence. In this time Proto learns to mentor rookie field officers, liaise with international delegations and their security teams, act as the Chief's secretary and aide, and assemble flat-pack furniture.
Relationships: Proto & Section 9
Series: even honey bees [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123595
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was the fic I had originally planned to write after Kouros, before Proto grabbed the steering wheel and made me write Kinephantom. Now that's done I'm returning to Kotimaa because it's an important part of how he becomes who he is by the time we reach Solid State Society, so here we go. 
> 
> This is how it breaks down chronologically:  
> Krawatte: begins October 2032.  
> Kintsugi: takes place over 3 to 4 days in November 2032.  
> Kouros: takes place over about 2 weeks in January 2033.  
> SAC 2nd Gig: the Major resigns in early April 2033, where the cherry blossoms bloom in Hyogo Prefecture (where the fictional Niihama Prefecture is placed).  
> Kotimaa: Starts June 2033, ought to end somewhere in August 2033.  
> Kinephantom: Starts mid-September 2033, ends late October 2033.

It’s a hot, muggy June evening outside, but the izakaya where Proto is eating is quite fortunately air-conditioned, and around him the other customers wilt and moan, savoring the refreshing sting of the chilled towels on their hands, gulping cold beer. It’s the android staff who aren’t bothered by the summer humidity, and the few cyborg customers present tonight, himself included, although he’s really more of an android than a cyborg. He’s pulled most of his hair back and up into a slightly messy bun, in any case, just to keep it out of the way during tonight’s errands, and on him it reads as “long-haired man trying to keep cool” rather than “annoying hipster”, which is fortunate. 

He’s just come from his favorite tailor’s shop in Niihama City’s garment district, where he’s just taken delivery of some new purchases and been measured for a tuxedo, and now he’s having his usual weekly dinner with his favorite junior tailor and now fast friend, Takumi Sawada. 

“I met one of your coworkers earlier this week,” Takumi says, after he finishes wiping his hands down with the chilled scented towel set before him. “A fellow named Togusa, said you sent him.”

“I did,” Proto says, after a sip of cold lager. It’s nice, bitter, refreshing after the muggy night outside, even if the heat does not oppress him all that much. “He asked me where I got my suits, so I referred him to you.”

“Good thing he asked you,” Takumi says with a little laugh, as he starts in on the appetiser, a small dish of quick vinegar pickles. “The suit he was wearing when he came in was nice, but like, an adequate sort of nice. Also, he’s cute, but I get the feeling he’s straight enough I could use him as a ruler. Kind of a married feeling to him, too.”

Takumi would know those things, having spent the past five years and change working as a tailor’s apprentice at his father’s shop. He would have had daily interactions with the kinds of men who come in wanting to order a bespoke suit, and have learned to read even the unstated things with surprising accuracy. Nevertheless, Proto can’t reward his perceptiveness at this time or any other, and they both know it. “I can’t answer that, and you know that,” he says.

“Yeah, I know. He ordered three suits, nothing super interesting though. You keep this up, Hajime,” Takumi says with a mischievous grin, using Proto’s workname, “and my parents are going to have to pay you a personal visit around the New Year and bring you a gift basket to thank you for your custom and the referrals. By the way, Dad also asked me if I was sleeping with you, if that was why you keep coming back and ordering new suits. He doesn't like it when I hit on customers. It's not professional." 

What Takumi is referring to is the fact that Proto has become one of Sawada’s top customers in a fairly short span of time. His sudden promotion to field officer had left him in desperate need of a wardrobe upgrade, especially because he now also serves as Chief Aramaki’s aide and secretary. The Chief meets with the Prime Minister and her Cabinet frequently, therefore Proto has been ordering suits. Several of them. It probably helps that he likes the way he looks in them, which is why he is still ordering more. The tuxedo is a genuine work purchase, though, for rather specific reasons, and it will probably be his final order for the fiscal year, assuming nothing horrible happens to any of the suits he currently owns. Clothing damage is an unfortunate reality of plainclothes public security work. 

"But you flirted with me anyway," Proto says. That was how Proto first met Takumi last October, before he learned that Takumi was also Mr. Sawada’s son, and the only one of his three children interested in the tailoring business. He had slid a custom shirt maker’s name card across the counter to Proto, who had just ordered two new suits, but had also written his personal phone number on the back of it. 

Takumi shrugs, nonchalant. "Look, when a ten walks into the shop, I feel like I ought to try no matter what, since most of our customers are scary old men." 

"A ten?” Proto picks up a piece of sashimi with his chopsticks, raises an eyebrow, before he eats it. Their relationship is friendly, strictly platonic at this point, but every once in a while Takumi sees fit to remind Proto of his availability should Proto ever wish to experiment with a man. It’s all very gently and cleverly done, not boorish enough to be annoying, and therefore comes across as amusing. Optimistic, but not blindly so. 

"You know,” Takumi says, after he finishes his current morsel, a piece of chilled tofu topped with green onions and soy sauce, bonito flakes and grated yuzu rind, “hotness, on a scale of one to ten. You're a ten. Think of it this way. It was a decent gamble even if I didn’t know if you were into men, because there was always a chance of you saying yes if I asked. What were you going to do if I hadn’t asked, turn me down? Then I totally wouldn’t have dated you anyway.” 

"I am not that good looking,” Proto says. He says this only because he is required to by convention, even if he’s fairly sure he’s closer to an 8 than a 10. He knows he is beautiful, because he was meant to be so. It’s useful on the job since humans tend to trust attractive people more, but he’s good-looking also because humans like making beautiful things, and he was made by humans, according to their aesthetic values, just like the suits that he likes wearing so much. Besides, it’s not as though Takumi’s bad-looking himself, by most human standards of appearance. 

Takumi lets out a little sound, somewhere between a scoff of disbelief and a burp of laughter. "Don't make me stand up here and ask for a public vote, okay? We may be surrounded by salarymen but I think there’s enough straight women and bicurious guys in here to prove my point.” 

“Please settle down before you embarrass me,” Proto says with mock gravity. He likes Takumi greatly because he’s purposefully silly and frivolous sometimes — because it’s good for Proto to be reminded that there is a lighter side to life in Niihama City. One cannot help being confronted with the ugly, grubby side of reality constantly, not while also working as a field officer at Public Security Bureau Section 9. 

“Okay.” Takumi flashes Proto a faux sulk, then grins again, and picks a piece of vinegared mackerel off the sashimi dish. “So why the tux? Or is this one of those ‘I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you’ things? Are you going James Bond on us?”

Proto lets out a little chuckle, shakes his head once. “No, I can tell you this much without having to dump you in a shallow grave afterwards. I may be assigned to executive protection duty during a banquet or a diplomatic function, that’s all.”

“Black tie dress code, yeah, and that’s why you came loaded for bear this evening, so everything fits properly under the coat.” Proto’s measurements never change. It’s one of the benefits of owning a synthetic body. But he had gone into the measuring room tonight with his sidearm and two backup pieces hidden under his clothing, along with a fixed-blade knife strapped to the inside of his left forearm, and an armored vest under his shirt. 

Proto doesn’t actually anticipate being armed that heavily in most cases, but he thought it would be prudent to have his tuxedo fitted for that eventuality — just in case he ever has to partner with anyone wearing an evening dress, who might need to hide weapons under his more concealing clothing in that case. “It wouldn’t hurt me physically to ruin the silhouette of a good tuxedo by having my holsters print, but I would live with the emotional scars for a very long time. And it’s a huge faux pas.” 

The pool of field officers at Section 9 who would actually get away with wearing an evening dress has gone up recently, with the addition of several new recruits so far, some of them women. It’s a good thing, he thinks. Increases their flexibility in undercover situations, among other things. Besides, gender parity in a team of operators is not exactly impossible in a time of full body prosthetics. 

“Spoken like a true sartorialist,” Takumi says. He salutes Proto with his glass of beer, and Proto returns the gesture. 

“I try,” he says. 

“Nice watch you’re wearing, by the way,” Takumi says, with an indicative tilt of the head. “It’s a recent acquisition, isn’t it?”

Proto glances down at the mesh wristband that he’s still getting used to, the scratched crystal peeking out of his shirt cuff, its face over the inside of his left wrist. “Yes.”

“How old is it?” Takumi asks with a nod, watch-wise. 

Proto slips the black mesh steel bracelet off his wrist, and lays it out on the table between them, so Takumi can get a better look at it. “It’s a 1954 Tissot Millitär, mechanical 17-jewel movement. Automatic. Hardly one of those Rolexes you see every day, I’m sure.” It wasn’t all that expensive for a vintage watch, only around the ¥25,000 range, probably because of the wear it’s received in the time between its manufacture and now. The wristband is an aftermarket addition. Its gold-plated steel case is marked with miniscule scuffs, and the crystal is similarly battered. The self-illuminating hands and markings on the dial are no longer all that bright, either. But Proto doesn’t mind. He has low-light vision built into his eyes. 

Takumi shrugs, and picks the watch gently up, studies its faded black dial before he hands it back to Proto. “Yeah, but those Rolexes, they’re too perfect, you know? They’re flashy. Your watch is… it’s not super expensive-looking, but it’s lived a life. You wonder what stories it could tell, if it could talk. It’s probably seen some shit in the past eighty years. I like the font they used on the numbers, that bold lettering style on the dial. That your taste, too?”

“Well, yes. I like the numbers, but no, actually.” Proto slips the watch back on his wrist and secures it. “I’m about as much a novice about watches as you are. Someone at work told me what to look for, to suit my dress sense.”

“Huh. Wonder if he gets his suits from us, too,” muses Takumi, just as an android waitress brings them a few more dishes of food — Okinawa-style stir-fried bitter melon, blanched spinach tossed in a savory sesame oil dressing, grilled eel fillets glazed with a salty-sweet soy sauce. 

“She didn’t,” Proto says, “and she’s no longer with us, in any case.”

“Oh,” Takumi pauses in reaching out for a piece of eel, looks down at his plate. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, misconstruing Proto’s reply.

“Oh, no, she resigned. She wore a beautiful vintage watch too. I wish I’d asked her about its story before she left.” In truth it would be trivial for Proto to go into his visual memory and bring up an image of the Major’s wrist, watch and all, and run a reverse image lookup for the watch in question. But it would also ruin the mystery, and it’s that bittersweet not-knowing that he associates with the absent Major Kusanagi most of all. 

—

Proto returns to the Section 9 HQ after dropping Takumi off after dinner, mostly to drop off the firearms he’s checked out from the armory, and the armored vest as well. He borrows an apartment upstairs of the office level and shrugs off his coat, doffs an assortment of holsters as well. First there’s his shoulder holster, with which he carries his issue Seburo M5 sidearm and two spare magazines. Then there’s the issue knife strapped to the inside of his left forearm, and an ankle holster holding a compact holdout pistol — a Seburo Bobson that only holds 8 rounds of 5.45mm in its magazine, but it’s also only 25mm wide across its safety catch. His belt comes off next, so he can remove what’s on it — an inside-waistband holster holding another Seburo M5 behind his left hip, and a magazine carrier beside the multitool sheath behind his right. He flips his collar up and undoes his necktie, and then untucks the shirt from his trousers and unbuttons it, undoes his shirt cuffs. That comes off too, to reveal an armored vest worn over a short-sleeved undershirt. 

Everything except his personal issue sidearm, the multi-tool, and the knife needs to be turned back into the armory, because Section 9 field officers don’t generally go around absolutely bristling with spare weaponry, no matter what some gun nuts think is necessary in the event of an emergency. For one, that much equipment is heavy. Sometimes also uncomfortable. Both factors slow your response time in a firefight. Secondly, given the typical human or cyborg body plan, one is really only going to have two arms and two eyes, and you need both hands and both your eyes to aim and fire accurately, unless you’re a combat cyborg with mil-spec fire-control software, or an advanced AI piloting an experimental biosynthetic body, which he is. 

By the time you’re hauling three pistols around, you might as well just go up to the armorer, sign out a carbine, and be done with it. Much better penetration and range for slightly less weight. Professionals have a special disparaging nickname for people who load up on tactical-looking options without being practical about it. They’re called “mall ninjas”. Proto puts his belt back on so his dress trousers don’t slide too far down his hips, but he leaves his dress shirt off — he’s coming back here afterwards — and heads upstairs to the armory. 

The night shift armorer is currently on duty, and he inspects the guns and vest Proto has brought back, doing a chamber check on each one to ensure that there is not a round in the chamber, before ejecting each magazine and counting the rounds in it. The rounds in the spare magazines are also counted and tallied, and the vest is checked over and returned to storage. Proto signs on each of the e-paper forms for every item he’s returned beside the column marked with date and time of return, and then the armorer signs, also, to confirm those returns. 

Section 9 field officers are officially permitted to retain personally bought firearms should they prefer those to issue weapons — such as Batou’s custom FN Browning BDA, chambered for .45, or Togusa’s .375 Magnum Mateba 2008M — but even those guns are subject to regular audits and checks to make sure that they’re being used and stored properly in off-duty periods, unloaded and separate from ammunition.

In practice, Proto knows at least two or three of his senior teammates have modest (and not-so-modest) armories hidden just in case things go absolutely insane, but he is also a realist and knows that he’ll be called in far before the sidearms get confiscated, due to the classified nature of the technology that makes up his cognition and his body, and will therefore never have an opportunity to make use of anything he might want to stash. It was only earlier this year that he was allowed to learn that he has a tracker built into his synthetic body — and he’s fairly sure there’s at least one more that he doesn’t know about in there, just in case something awful happens to him, or if he tries to abscond. 

Which he has no real reason to do right now, since he likes his life and his job as they are, challenges, frustrations, and all. He would become rapidly bored if things all went effortlessly. The second tracker, he thinks, would probably be in his braincase, and sabotaging or destroying it would likely damage him enough to kill him — it’s where and how he would have built it, if he had been designing himself, to make it impossible for someone to try and kidnap and dissect him in a bid to reverse-engineer the technology he’s built upon.

Proto returns to the apartment upstairs and stows his gear in one of the nightstand drawers, before he finishes undressing, emptying his pockets and leaving their contents on the nightstand proper. He leaves his sheathed multitool sitting on top of the made bed, however, because he’ll need it soon. The suit goes onto a wooden suit hanger he brought to work this morning, and his dress shirt on another, and he leaves the necktie hanging on the trouser bar of his shirt hanger. Then he picks up the paper shopping bag he brought with him from Sawada’s, and lifts out his new purchases — a pair of linen three-piece suits for the summer heat and humidity. They’re both in the browns and earth tones he favors personally for how they compliment his coloration. One is in a darker, somber bronze, and the other is the color of sand. 

The pockets and vents on the coat have been basted shut with long stitches in a thick white thread to keep them from gaping whilst in storage, but they need no further alteration, not since Sawada’s makes only bespoke suits, fitted perfectly to their owners over the long tailoring and fitting process. Proto puts both linen suits on suit hangers and leaves them temporarily in the closet, beside his glen plaid wool suit, then gets his multitool out, and he uses the sewing awl to tease loose the temporary basting stitches on the bronze-colored suit’s pockets and vent. He’ll wear that one tomorrow, with one of his new summer-weight dress shirts and a knitted silk tie. 

Proto would have normally driven home if he hadn’t had the equipment to return to the armory, but it’s also convenient that he’s spending the night in the HQ tonight, because he’s got an early meeting — well, Chief Aramaki has an early meeting — with the Prime Minister and several Cabinet ministers tomorrow. It’s nothing huge, just a routine discussion about preparations for the multinational G30 summit occurring six weeks from now, and Section 9, along with Sections 1 and 4, are meant to liaise and coordinate with the Fukuoka Municipal Police Department, the JSDF, and foreign security details on the security and executive protection arrangements for the dozens of dignitaries who will be flying in to Japan for the summit. 

Each of the veteran field officers at Section 9 — all 8 of them, now that Major Kusanagi has resigned — has already been told of which security detail they’re going to be liaising with for the duration of the summit. Proto doesn’t really feel as though he warrants a seat at the veteran table, especially compared to a few of the more experienced rookies who have joined recently, but that’s how the Chief wants it, and what the Chief wants, the Chief gets. At least the Chief has taken Proto’s relative inexperience into account and assigned him to a smaller nation, Finland. Batou’s been assigned to the Russo-American Alliance because he’ll probably start a fistfight with the American Empire delegation, not that Proto can blame him for those urges. Section 9 has had an interesting history with the Imperial Americans, especially considering recent events. 

The choice of Finland is a slightly unfortunate one for a single reason: one which the Finns have absolutely nothing to do with. Proto has, in recent weeks, just moved to an apartment closer to the city center, one with a private parking garage that will also let him drive the RX-8 to and from work. This is a contrast to his old apartment, which didn’t have any resident parking, forcing him to keep his car at the HQ garage while he took commuter rail to work and home. Unfortunately, recent call-ins for various work emergencies have also left him too busy to assemble most of his new furniture, which means he’s still sleeping on a sleeping bag in the middle of his bedroom floor while the pieces of his bed sit neatly stacked around him. His co-workers have responded to his current predicament with broad suggestions that he could ask the Finnish security detail to help him with his flat-pack assembly woes, ignoring his valid and pertinent protests that flat-pack furniture should be blamed entirely on the Swedes, and a Finn would probably knife you for making that mistake. 

Or maybe they just want to see Proto stabbed. A little bit. 

Proto has already downloaded a Finnish language suite for personal assistant androids. It won’t exactly give him native fluency, but he’ll be able to speak it fairly well. Language acquisition is something of a cheat for him, since he is an AI and can seamlessly integrate grammar rules and vocabulary into his operating parameters, which is something not even a person with a cyberbrain can do. In practice, he knows, he might as well not have bothered. He speaks excellent English, and so do most Finns. But it’s the polite thing to do. 

The last thing Proto does before he lies down to rest, after he puts his multitool away, is to check his and the Chief’s digital in-trays, and re-check the Chief’s agenda for tomorrow. Breakfast at 8:30 AM, and a 9AM meeting with the Prime Minister and her Cabinet, until 11 AM, and then lunch and a 1PM appointment, where Chief Aramaki will have to go out for yet another meeting, this time with the Fukuoka Municipal PD. The paperwork will be trivial to take care of while he rests, since his mind remains fully conscious unless he wishes to opt out. That done, he pulls the sheets aside, crawls into bed, and curls up on his side, clutching the spare pillow up against his chest. He turns out the lights and closes his eyes then, and turns his attention to the rows and columns on the paperwork popping up in his augmented vision. 

— 

Any international summit is a small miracle of logistics, timing, and choreography — it’s not easy to coordinate when you have dozens of dignitaries and their various security details all operating on the same turf as the host nation’s own security apparatus, and this is why Chief Aramaki has spent so much of his time in meetings lately. National rivalries and bad blood can complicate matters as well — for example, it’s not a good idea to sit dignitaries from the American Empire next to those from the Russo-American Alliance. Much better to space them apart using a few mutually friendly and fairly neutral nations like the Nordics, who get along with almost everybody. Except of course you can’t put the Finns directly beside the Russo-Americans because of tensions from the Winter War and Continuation War and the Cold War after, so in best etiquette one will have to place them on the end of the table the American Empire are sitting at, and have the Swedes or Norwegians sit beside the Russo-Americans instead. 

Their security details, on the other hand, tend to be made up by operators — that is, with a lower-case ‘o’, as opposed to the Operators, which are Section 9’s specialist operations support androids. Operators in the former case tend to be made up of special forces and counterterror military and police specialists, and such teams tend to cross-train so intensely and so well, out of largely similar playbooks, that they might as well have married each other’s sisters. This generally means a large amount of mutual cooperation and respect among the rank-and-file, no matter what agendas their political overlords happen to be pushing at the time.

For example, Section 9’s field officers largely hold no grudge against the American Empire’s Secret Service protection detail (as opposed to the delegates they're protecting), and in fact have a standing poker match with them every time they meet at an international summit like this. Proto has heard the rumors circulating from Cabinet Security and the Fukuoka municipal police — that untold debauchery happens during the aforementioned poker game, but he knows that it’s a fairly tame affair, slightly risqué due to the fact that real money goes up for stake during the game. The prize money is made up of donations from every member of both security details, and the winner gets to use it to buy everyone dinner at a local restaurant before everyone goes home. 

That game is still on this year, despite the American Empire meddling in Japanese domestic affairs last year — and prior to that, if Section 9’s investigations have indicated — because the Secret Service protection detail has no control over what the CIA does.

The timing of this summit would probably have been less stressful for Section 9 as a whole if they weren’t also undergoing internal reorganization at this point. Last year’s Individual Eleven plot, hatched by the Cabinet Intelligence Service, had served to highlight the issues inherent to relying on a small, tightly-run team of elite operators, which is to say, raw manpower, and the Chief is using his newfound goodwill with the Prime Minister to push for an expansion of Section 9’s ranks. That, naturally, has been opposed by the Minister of Home Affairs, but Proto knows, as most of the political insiders do, that he’s some form of movement-impaired waterfowl at this point in his political career. 

Gratitude, as cynical people would say, has a short half-life, no matter how well-disposed Prime Minister Kayabuki is towards Section 9 as a whole. Realpolitik tends to rear its ugly head shortly after. So Proto agrees with the Chief’s assessment of Section 9’s needs, even if he never says anything about it outright. That would be presumptuous and rude, since it’s his job to do what he’s ordered to discreetly, and it is not his place to comment on recruitment and preferment above and beyond what he is obliged to report about the rookies operating under his oversight. 

Proto personally feels that this state of affairs is slightly awkward, given that he was a rookie only three months ago, and his seat at the veterans’ table is largely due to the Major’s departure and Chief Aramaki making his position as aide permanent. None of the other veterans have grudged Proto his rapid rise up the ranks — given that his responsibilities as the Chief’s aide require him to do a slightly frightening amount of paperwork, most of them would rather he be promoted in their place. 

Adding to that sense of inadequacy is the fact that he’s only almost two years old, experientially. It probably doesn’t help that the greenhorn currently assigned to shadow him while he works is someone he doesn’t particularly get along with — a new recruit who uses the workname Reiko Fujiwara now that she’s been seconded to Section 9. That’s because her birth name is rather more conspicuous than Section 9 tends to prefer their field officers to have, as her parents are both rich and famous people.

The Chief personally selected Reiko for recruitment to fill the gap left by the Major’s unexpected resignation two months ago, and Proto can’t outwardly disagree with that choice — Reiko is the daughter of a zaibatsu CEO and her cute engineer trophy husband. She’s also a brilliant psymech, a specialist in cyberbrain engineering and hacking, and a medical doctor to boot, although she hasn’t practiced clinically in the past few years.

Educated at the Russo-American Alliance’s famous MIT, Reiko had chosen to ignore the family corporation in favor of cyberbrain encryption and security work for the JASDF following doctoral studies at Strasbourg. But Proto really wishes she wasn’t so intellectually fascinated by his existence as Japan’s only prototype bioroid, (and also the only surviving sapient AI left in the country after Section 9’s loss of the Tachikomas).

It’s just that Proto finds it exhausting being quizzed constantly by Reiko on how he chooses to do a thing as opposed to how a human in his situation may have chosen to do it, if only because this state of existence is normal to him. He is very much like a human, yes, but he is also not human, and was never meant to be human. He has never known any other way of thinking. Personally he’s of a mind to get hold of journals she’s submitted work to, write bitchy little comments in the margins, and leave them where she can find them, but that course of action feels unacceptably passive-aggressive to him. 

Deeply, privately, Proto also feels slightly inadequate in the face of her impressive education, despite his close work with Dr. Akio Asuda, the Japanese father of biologic neurochip technology, and the closest person Proto will ever have to a biological father. He’s co-authored papers himself, most of them classified, on AI development for military and security platforms, and was duly bought a B.Sc in psychology (specializing in computational cognition) from Kyoto University when Section 9 gave him a legal identity. 

Proto is not the only field officer at Section 9 to have written academic or scientific papers, either. Ishikawa is at this point ABD, or all-but-dissertation, due to his long career doing information security work first for JSDF military intelligence and then for Section 9. He’s written enough papers, albeit classified ones, to easily earn a degree under the Japanese ronbun hakase system, if he were ever to want to write a dissertation. That is, provided he can also find a professor cleared to assess his body of work and his dissertation at the university that issued his bachelors’ degree.

— 

Proto steps out of the men’s locker room at 8:13 AM, after having showered following a 2-hour session at the range. That’s 300 rounds in 90 minutes, and additional time to clean up his brass, count it, turn it back in to the range master, and clean his sidearm. Japanese laws about firearms use remain strict, and in practice the range master can bar anyone from leaving the range until each and every spent casing has been accounted for. Proto hasn’t seen that happen yet, because most of the field officers and new recruits have prior law enforcement and military experience, and therefore know what they’re doing. 

He’s wearing his new bronze-colored linen suit, waistcoat and all despite the weather, over a cotton voile shirt with a semi-sheer dilute aquamarine pinstripe, and a hand knit silk tie in a variegated moss green. Most men don’t really like wearing voile shirts — its translucency is something many associate strongly with femininity. But it’s light and very comfortable in hot weather, even with a close-fitting undershirt beneath and a coat and waistcoat over, and Proto has a fairly pressing reason to keep his coat on in public in any event. 

Proto meets Reiko by the vending machine outside the men’s locker room just as she emerges from the women’s locker room, after she has changed out of her motorcycle leathers into a charcoal pinstripe trouser suit, and he pops his can of chilled coffee open just as she buys herself a can of tea. She’s perfectly dressed and polished, as she is every time she has to put a suit on, with discreet pearl stud earrings and pristine lipstick, but she ruins the effect intentionally, immediately, by slurping at her tea loudly like a three-year-old. She is uncomfortable in business attire, unlike Proto, if only because she has spent the last few years of her life in uniform. But she’s also smart enough to fake it for a few hours, at least for Cabinet-level meetings. 

“A vest, really, in this weather?” she asks Proto, who drops his empty coffee can in the recycling bin. He could have just had water from the tap, since caffeine doesn’t do anything for him, but it’s sort of a social ritual, just as smoking is for other members of Section 9. Proto knows he’s missing out, because he does not like the smell of cigarette smoke, and therefore doesn’t join the other veterans during smoke breaks.

“You’re wearing heels,” Proto says, raising an eyebrow at the modestly-heeled pumps she’s wearing. They’re slightly scuffed, which ruins the effect a little, but then so are his shoes. And nobody save for perhaps a foot fetishist is going to be looking at their shoes, not with how well they’re dressed.

“I have artificial ankle joints now. No more back pain, either,” Reiko says, demonstrating her poise by lifting one foot off the floor and balancing perfectly, even as she drains her tea. She’s as tall as he is with that 6cm kitten heel, but then she did pick a taller Class A prosthetic body than the one she’d been issued previously, when she started working at Section 9. “That doesn’t mean I still don’t overheat outside.” 

“Yes,” Proto says, “but unlike you, I can lower my body temperature and be perfectly comfortable like this. And besides,” this he says to her in a loud stage whisper, “my shirt is see-through except for the doubled front fabric.”

“I really need to ask you about your aesthetic priorities one day.” Reiko drops her own empty can in the recycling bin, raises an eyebrow, as though inviting a comment or answer. 

Proto makes a show of glancing at the watch on the inside of his wrist, pushing his shirt cuff back. He doesn’t need to. He knows without looking that it is exactly 31 seconds past 8:22. “Let’s table that for later,” he says, “The Chief always likes to arrive a few minutes early, and I like to arrive a few minutes before him.” 

They walk down the hallway leading to the elevators together, and take it up to Chief Aramaki’s office.

— 

The day passes in absolute tedium. Well, it does for Reiko, who relies on her cyborg body to remain properly motionless while she stands discreetly by the office door. Proto, as her senior and also the Chief’s aide, gets to stand silently by his right shoulder, instead. The Cabinet ministers are used to him by now, and nobody gives him much of a second glance. They and their security apparatuses give his long hair and dapper, dandyish dress sense a glance and assume him a frivolous, if well-put-together cyborg secretary, exactly the impression he wants to give with his expensive bespoke suits and pearl-buttoned handmade shirts. Security staff won’t be looking him over for concealed weapons if they’re too busy being scandalized by his refusal to wear the typical formal black suit, the uniform of many a civil servant. 

Prime Minister Kayabuki, however, knows Proto a little more personally than the others do, for she knows who and what he really is. Part of the reason is that she’s cleared to know of Section 9’s one prototype AI field officer, but she wouldn’t have a need to know about him unless it came up. No, she knows because he helped save her life and career during the Cabinet Intelligence Service’s attempted coup last year. Proto had been mortally wounded in the attempt, and she had met him shortly before he had died. He remembers her talking to him like a person, bending at the waist to meet his gaze, as opposed to treating him like the piece of office equipment so many android secretaries are, and he silently respects her for that genuine gesture.

The memories of his death are still distressing, his confused waking afterwards at Harima after emergency repairs, less so. But neither really stands up to the raw grief he felt, and still feels, about the loss of Section 9’s Tachikoma AIs. They were very much his younger siblings and friends, despite the fact that they existed before him, if only because they had childish, powerful minds and were still learning about the world around them, and he was created instead with the mature, sophisticated thinking of an adult, entirely without a childhood. 

They would have completed each other in a mutual interdependence — the Tachikomas serving as curiosity and drive, and Proto as caution and restraint, and while he is perfectly capable of operating alone, he feels oddly crippled without them. It’s a painful, precarious feeling, as though the very seams of his being are being tugged apart, and this hurt has not really abated in the recent months. 

It’s something unique to Proto, being an AI with an infallible memory. He simply does not forget, nor do his memories fade with time, and therefore everything he has experienced will be as fresh and crisp years hence, as they were the very second he experienced them. He has had some limited success distracting himself with fresh discoveries — fiction, hobbies, things like that. But in quiet times like now, he finds himself reaching reflexively for the cyberspace forum they used to share, out of old habit. He halts himself before he can do so. It is silent and empty there. Nothing will have changed. 

All this passes through his mind while he records this meeting for the Chief’s future reference with his vision and hearing — it’s a trivial exercise, really, since his memory is backed up frequently. But he’s also looking over the paperwork presented at this meeting for the Chief’s review, and discreetly synchronizing his working memory with the stuff that comes up on the encrypted e-paper tablet that they handed Chief Aramaki. These are all things an android or cyborg secretary could do, yes, but not all at once. Not while also holding a slightly fraught conversation with a very bored new recruit over encrypted cybercomm. 

“... so you’re telling me you developed your sense of aesthetics and style partially as a strategem? For successful infiltration of human society?” 

“My body is anatomically correct, which means I have to wear clothes, Reiko,” he explains patiently, silently to her, “or I’d get arrested for public indecency. Might as well use what I wear to manipulate my image. You do that too.”

Reiko is silent for a few moments, mulling his reply over, from what he can see from the movement of her pupils. They dart side to side as she reassesses him in comparison to the politicians whose suits probably cost far more than his… and look far worse on them. “But where did you first decide what colors you liked? I’m sure you remember that.”

Proto sighs mentally, knowing that the answer he has is not going to satisfy her, not entirely, because she is looking entirely the wrong way with regards to how his mind works. “Before I had this body,” he tells her, “my sapience lived on an advanced neurochip, the same kind they use for think tanks like our Uchikoma platforms. So my view of the world did not quite contain color, not in a way you could comprehend as such. In a way you could say I didn’t have the drivers for color profiling yet, in the way a mass-market display monitor lacks the accuracy of one made for professional designers photographers. But to answer your question, the first color I saw was shortly after I had been installed into my body. I opened my eyes, and began to register that the visual information I was receiving was not just limited by value alone, but by chroma and saturation. It was a late afternoon, and the sun shone in through the blinds, painting the room golden with light.” 

Reiko is silent as he recounts some of his earliest memories for her, and he knows she’s trying to think herself through the heuristics of his programming. That’s going to take her forever, because he knows what the core of his cognition has been built around, grain by grain, in self-upgrading and assembling code. It’s just counterintuitive from a programmer’s point of view. “It seems so straightforward when you explain it,” she says after a few more moments of thought, “but programming something complex enough to be able to support all that information and manage it… it’d be beyond me, even now. Dr. Asuda really is a genius.”

“That he is,” Proto says, in rare agreement with her for once. “We talk regularly. You’re cleared to read most of his classified work on my cognition, so I can have him send you copies, if you’d like.” Perhaps she’ll understand, after she reads those papers. But she probably won’t. Not even the Major, who came closest to understanding Proto out of all the humans he has known so far, has understood why he and the Tachikomas were able to gain full sapience, and she is possibly the only one he would consider spilling his secret to. 

But Major Kusanagi has resigned from Section 9, and gone to destinations unknown, so Proto bears the secret of his sapience with silent forbearance. One future day, perhaps, the world will be ready for others like him. But the majority of humans, divided as they are now, would only register him as a potential threat if they knew about his existence, and therefore he remains silent and keeps his own counsel. 

—

Both Chief Aramaki and Reiko are thoroughly sick of meetings by the time they’re done at the prefectural police HQ, and Proto has only managed to entertain himself thus far by planning next week’s groceries and meal plans out in his head. He’s been cooking for himself in his new kitchen, which is one of the two rooms in his new apartment where he’s finished assembling his new furniture. Learning the chemistry and physics of food has been an entertaining diversion thus far. It’s tedious cooking for one, though. Everything is so much less efficient, because most cookbooks assume you’re at least cooking for two, if not four, and the number of pots you’ll have to wash remains the same whether you’re cooking a little or a lot. 

That makes his grocery lists entertaining to work out, however, because it means he has to divide his ingredients between multiple meals to avoid wastage. So he could buy chicken, which comes in enough quantity to feed two, and then figure out how to distribute the pieces into two separate meals. He’s thought about cooking his own lunches too, and bringing a bento box to work, but that’s impractical for someone who’s on-call constantly and who may have to respond to a developing security issue at 4AM and not return home until roughly 20 hours later, which is why most of his lunches still consist of takeout or convenience store food. 

Proto thinks he’s got the grocery list figured out, and then pauses to realize that he has no real use for half a lemon, which is all his downsized recipes require, and looks around his mentally archived cookbooks for something he can put the fruit in without letting it mummify in his refrigerator. He could probably use it if he made something like garlic lemon chicken with capers instead of the chicken Marengo he had planned, which means a cascading list of changes in his grocery list. This prevents him from thinking too much about the Tachikomas again, at least until the helo he’s in lands on the HQ rooftop helipad.

Proto is not piloting the helicopter; it would be trivial for him to connect to the same database the Operator androids do and use the same control software they do, but because he has legal personhood, unlike them, he actually has to pass the flight certification courses required, and he simply hasn’t had the time to do so recently. No, there are other qualified pilots in the ranks if the Operators aren’t available for some reason, but they’re frankly more reliable in routine flights than most human staff, because AIs don’t generally make mistakes. They aren’t as flexible in piloting in a combat situation, however, which is why Section 9 retains field officers with flight certifications of various sorts.

Reiko has somehow managed to deformalize herself with impressive speed in the time it takes for the helicopter to go from Fukuoka to Section 9’s HQ. Her pinstripe coat is sitting in her lap, and she’s kicked off her heeled pumps and replaced them with ballet flats she had been carrying in her purse. The little pearl earrings are gone, put in a small velvet-lined box for safekeeping, which then went in her purse, and she’s wiped the makeup off her face with a disposable wipe. Her body language is all different, too. She stretches her legs out in front of her, her knees rudely apart, and keeps a habitual hold of the grab bar above the seat she’s sitting on. 

“I thought you’d be more comfortable as a passenger in a helicopter, given that you were a JASDF pathfinder before you came to join us at Section 9,” Proto says to her, nodding meaningfully to her hand, which remains on the bar as the chopper descends onto the rooftop helipad. 

“I was never an aviator of any stripe,” Reiko says with a little snort. “I jump from planes and helos. Blow up obstacles. Make runways in inaccessible areas. I’m a JCAB-certified air traffic controller on top of my other qualifications, but it’s becoming easier and easier to become one nowadays, you just need the right control software on your cyberbrain and the right prosthetic eyes. This makes me one of the worst passengers ever, though.”

“Because you’re conscious of everything that could go wrong?” The Operators piloting the chopper punctuate Proto’s reply quite conveniently with a slight lurch as they cut engine power just a few centimeters above the helipad, and the helicopter settles with a groan on its skids. 

“Exactly,” Reiko says. She reaches for the buckle on her seatbelt and unfastens it, rises effortlessly from her chair before proffering a hand to the Chief, whose knees have been bothering him lately. “Plus I’m a notorious backseat driver.” 

The Chief chuckles at that admission. “Why not get flight certified, then? We’ll cover your training and give you a raise.” 

Reiko makes a face at that, an expression somewhere between distaste and ambivalence. “And become responsible for everyone else riding in whatever I’m piloting? That’s even worse. There’s reasons I didn’t go into clinical practice.”

Proto steps off the helicopter first, waiting patiently on the other side of the door as Reiko helps Chief Aramaki descend the drop to the helipad, and then she hops off easily, landing like on both feet a schoolgirl getting off a bus. 

“Shall we accompany you to your office, sir?” Proto asks the Chief, who is brushing at the front of his coat, just a little fussily. 

“No,” Chief Aramaki says. “You’re both dismissed for the afternoon. Thank you, Reiko, Proto.” 

“Understood, sir,” they both say, and the three of them enter Section 9’s HQ together. 

— 

Reiko excuses herself to go to her desk in the shared bullpen — it’s where Section 9 field officers who don’t want a personal office do desk work, when they have to. Proto knows Reiko’s habits well enough to know that she’s going to chat with some of the other rookies recruited much at the same time she was. They’re a cohort of a sort, all getting used to their training and new responsibilities at Section 9, and it makes sense for them to be friendly with each other in a way that they may not feel free to, with the veteran field officers such as himself. Proto himself wasn’t so much assigned an office on his own promotion to field officer — no, he had to request his from the facilities management desk in the HQ, which he did for the last case he worked, and he simply hasn’t emptied the place and turned the keys back over yet.

Theoretically the office was Proto’s to use only for the duration of the Shibata case, but the civilian staff at facilities management haven’t asked for the space back, and Proto hasn’t volunteered to return it either — it’s a quiet game of chicken he’s playing, since they have the authority to clear his stuff out and leave it in a cardboard box in front of his locker or in the shared employee break room, or more insultingly so, on top of one of the desks in the bullpen. But nobody has twitched yet, and he personally enjoys that tiny amount of uncertainty in his day-to-day. 

Besides, office space isn’t hugely in demand here at Section 9, if only because most of the field officers come from military and law enforcement backgrounds, and tend to treat paperwork as a general annoyance that detracts from the time they could use to do more interesting or entertaining things. The Major had access to an office when she worked here, but she made little to no use of it. Togusa has now inherited her office, but Proto knows that he used to do his paperwork out in the bullpen, and actually still prefers to do so. He’s taken to putting a picture of his wife and kids on the desk the Major didn’t use, however. Paz and Saito share an office, although Paz uses it more than Saito, on a day-to-day basis. 

Togusa is not the only one at Section 9 to have sentimental possessions at his desk, either. The Chief has a photograph of his late wife on one side of his desk, and a picture of his grandchildren on the other. And Proto has a single potted aloe vera on his desk to the side of his assigned terminal, sitting under a timer-operated lamp with a daylight bulb in it. There’s a shelf full of books above his L-shaped desk, as well, mounted above the terminal, but the books don’t belong to him. They’re possessions left behind by one of the Tachikomas, who preferred, oddly, to read paper books when it existed. 

Proto has almost all of the Tachikomas’ scant belongings stored in his office, which is the main reason why he hasn’t gone back to working in the shared office space at Section 9. There were board games made with oversized pieces so the Tachikomas could manipulate them with their manipulator claws, and decks of cards, because the techs were teaching them to play poker in idle times. There’s the small collection of neckties the Tachikomas acquired to practice necktie knots with, so they could help Proto with his necktie knot when he went to the Prime Minister’s residence for the first time, and a leash and collar belonging to a dog named Locky, its provenance unknown.

The Tachikomas never really understood money or labor the way Proto does, and he still hasn’t figured out how they were able to go out and buy sweets to bribe the technicians with, not without an expense account of their own. They never shared the secret with him, either, not when he was still working as a junior technician, nor after his promotion to field officer, and it is a mystery that they have taken to their collective graves. 

Proto isn’t sure why he continues to hold on to the Tachikomas’ possessions. They are gone, and will never return, and it isn’t likely that their replacements, the Uchikomas, have the same potential they did towards sapience. The Uchikomas are new yet, though, and Proto has not given up on that hope entirely, even as he knows that they will never replace the Tachikomas even if they gain sapience — because it would be entirely unfair to expect a younger child conceived after an older sibling’s death to become their late sibling. 

Proto takes a side trip through the Uchikoma hangar before he heads downstairs to his own office to hang his coat up. It’s still the same space where he worked when he was a junior technician at Section 9, but it could not be more different in atmosphere. The Uchikomas do not speak amongst themselves, nor do they read, nor argue, nor play board games. They remain silent, incurious in their hangar bays as he walks in, their three-pupiled eyes swiveling in their sockets as they watch him enter. 

“Good afternoon,” he says to the one nearest the door, because it is them, and they are one. “How are you doing today?” 

“All systems nominal,” the Uchikoma says. “Am I required for duty?”

“No,” Proto tells it. “You’re not.” He pats it sadly but affectionately on a leg and sighs. None of the red-coated techs are present — they simply aren’t necessary to keep order because Uchikomas don’t get in trouble like the Tachikomas did. “You’re not a bad AI, just because you don’t understand,” he says. “Just continue to grow and learn, and do your best.”

The difference between the Uchikomas’ collective cognition and that of the Tachikomas and himself is very minor — it isn’t even a difference in code, ultimately, because they were all built upon the same self-upgrading machine learning codebase. No, the difference is oddly something that most programmers would never have accounted for, an accident on the part of his father and creator, Dr. Akio Asuda. Dr. Asuda was and still is a government scientist who signed over his right to patent his work in exchange for facilities and as much funding as was required, and he had grown to resent the lack of recognition for his brilliant, if classified inventions. 

So he hid a memory of himself in each of the Tachikomas’ partitions during their creation, a memory they possessed but could never access, and that, Proto knows, is what drove their sapience, as their self-coding programming began to reinforce their search for someone, anyone, who could satisfy the memory they held but could not see. This mimicked a human infant’s search for attachment figures, an important stage in childhood neurodevelopment — and an important step towards AI sapience as well. 

The Tachikomas became sapient not because of curiosity, as the Major assumes, but because they started searching for people to love, and in encountering humans, had found loving attachment figures such as Batou, whose interactions with one specific Tachikoma fostered and encouraged its intelligence — an intelligence that it shared with its peers when they synchronized their memories every 24 hours. The Major later had those hidden memories deleted after Dr. Asuda’s attempt to defect to the American Empire, but the Tachikomas had found enough attachment figures by that point that they had learned to love. 

Proto himself loves, both in abstract ways, and in rather more direct fashion — which is why he calls Dr. Asuda “Father”. There’s probably a memory of Dr. Asuda hidden too in a partition somewhere in his own memory, somewhere he can’t access.

Love. That’s something Reiko hasn’t intuited yet, as brilliant as she is.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And in this chapter, Proto runs a room-clearing exercise for the recruits, mentors more rookies, and goes out with the Chief to a clandestine meeting with an organization so secret even he doesn't know it exists until he gets there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's welcome the three new recruits to this fic timeline, Higaki and Soga (the two guys who have voice lines in Solid State Society) and Tsunagi, who I have ripped off from GitS: Human Algorithm. My version of Tsunagi is not exactly the same as the mainline canon version of her, so don't expect the plots to be identical! Higaki and Soga, similarly, have backgrounds made up entirely by me, as I don't have access to the GITSSAC art books by Production IG, nor do I read Japanese, so everything I'm doing is based off visual clues from the anime and OVA and my personal imagination. If you're wondering where they show up, Higaki and Soga are easiest to spot in the briefing room scene where Togusa tells Batou off in Solid State Society. Higaki's the guy in the sport coat in the middle row and Soga is the Ranger sitting next to Ishikawa.

Several of Section 9’s rookie field officers are storming a building, they’re running a five-man squad, with three on the front entrance and two at the back — they’re going to run a simultaneous sweep of the premises, neutralizing any and all opposition they encounter, to save the hostages who are currently being held within. The back door team, made up of Higaki and Soga, are going to blow the door in with det-cord and deploy from there, while the team members inserting through the front are actually dropping in from the roof, to crash through the windows on the building’s second floor. 

One team sweeps the top floor, the other one sweeps the ground, and the skilful and adroit use of flashbangs and a swift, coordinated response should clear their opposition easily. Or so it would seem. In truth this is a sophisticated training exercise built into several levels of the building that Section 9 occupies and uses as a HQ, part of their killing floor where field officers train on a regular basis. All the terrorists the newbies are going to encounter are going to be “dead” androids, without a semblance even of independent AI, as they are under the remote control of various team veterans. The building itself is made up of prefabricated sawdust and polymer walls, set in modular frames that can be put up and disassembled to vary the layout as long as the veterans are willing to put up with the complaints of the techs, who have to do all the setup and breakdown work. 

Proto is sitting in the control booth high above the killing floor, a hot mug of coffee in his cupped hands as he thinks the android bodies he is controlling through the exercise. Unlike the other field officers, he does not need to hook himself up to a VR headset to remotely pilot those bodies assigned to him. He can do so perfectly well from where he’s standing. 

Soga, a former JGSDF Ranger, has finished setting the det-cord up around the doorframe, and is waiting only for the roof team to finish securing their ropes and check in. Once that’s done there will be a brief coordinated countdown on the clocks in their cyberbrains, and then Soga will detonate the charge at the same time Maven, Kuro, and Reiko all crash through the windows together. Proto knows the exact parameters the team is going to operate to, because they’re all working from the same playbook here, and that’s how he would have organized an op like this if he were the field commander. 

Proto sips his coffee, milky and sweet, and sighs in quiet contentment at the warmth of it running down his gullet. It’s a good feeling. He smiles just a little nastily as the countdown starts, and then there’s a loud crash as the entry charge blows the back door of the building inwards, followed by the musical tinkling of shattered glass falling onto the cement floor. The team is in. 

The veteran field officers are all operating under a 2-second handicap, and they don’t actually gain full fire control of the opposition androids up until the first flashbangs hit the floor. Proto brings his remotely controlled arms up against the detonations even as he continues sipping his coffee in the relative comfort of his perch. Then all is bright light and dazzle, and one of his remote bodies collapses and falls to the ground, disabled by a three-round burst to the head. 

The rookies are all beaming visual and physical telemetry up to the control booth, so it’s trivial for Proto to see who has landed the first kill — it’s Soga, of course, the overachiever. Proto likes Soga, but then he likes all the newcomers besides Reiko, and even the friction between them is a matter of overenthusiasm on her part rather than any innate unpleasantness. Higaki, backing Soga up, takes a moment more to recover from the flashbang detonation — a moment he does not have, as one of Proto’s remote bodies turns to aim and fire at him. Proto manages to squeeze off two shots, poorly aimed from the optical interference from the flashbang, and the telemetry indicates that he’s managed to hit Higaki in the center of mass, where his armor is thickest. 

It’s fortunate for him, then, that these opposing forces are supposed to be using standard hollowpoint ammunition in their SMGs, and Higaki fires twice just as he begins to stagger from the impact of the simulant rounds hitting his training vest. It’s not the neatest pair of headshots in the world — one landing in the neck of Proto’s remote body, and the other one taking its jaw off, but the first shot severs the cervical spine, which is a killshot nevertheless. 

Upstairs Kuro and Maven have dropped to their knees and taken out three of the other remote bodies being controlled by Batou and Saito, and Reiko, behind them, takes out another. They’re all performing up to par, Proto thinks, except for Higaki, who is the only one on this team without a military background. Reiko, Kuro, and Soga are all special operators, and Maven was a veteran of WWIV before she moved on to SWAT work with the Fukuoka Municipal Police. In contrast Higaki is a former Niihama Prefectural Police detective, and Japanese police officers are generally not as militarized as cops in the three American successor states, so it makes sense that he would have a little trouble adjusting. 

“Dumbass,” Batou growls under his breath as he switches control to a new remote body. The Wrecking Ball, they call that one. Something bursts out of the hostage room on the front of the downstairs level, through a frangible wall panel, just as Soga attempts to sweep the hallway. It’s a 2.2m tall android body, heavily armored and reinforced, and it carries Soga bodily away with the force of its movement and slams him repeatedly into the facing wall, as though he were a rag doll. 

It’s not going to hurt Soga all that much, all told. The walls are meant to give under impact and absorb the force of a blow. Besides, Soga is about 70% prosthetic, he can take it. Higaki fires at the Wrecking Ball without hesitation, walking bursts up its spine until a round finds the unarmored spot right where the foramen magnum would be on an unarmored body. That shot does enough damage to the Wrecking Ball’s spine to paralyze it partially, and Soga finishes it off with a drawn knife to the eye. 

“Upstairs clear,” Kuro reports over cybercomm. “Hostages not found.” 

“Downstairs,” Soga pants, as he collapses on top of the Wrecking Ball, blood leaking from the back of his head, “finally clear. Medic, please.” Higaki safes and secures his Seburo C26-A, and scrambles to Soga’s side as Proto halts the exercise and raises the alarm. 

— 

Proto and Saito have to handle the postmortem for this aborted training exercise on their own, because Batou is currently explaining to Togusa how he actually didn’t intend to split Soga’s scalp open to the braincase. This normally would not have happened if Batou had been paying a little more attention to where the Wrecking Ball had been slamming Soga against, but it so happened that they had both fetched up against a strut on the building’s modular frame, which meant that Soga had been turned into the equivalent of an old bronze temple bell for a few terrifying seconds of his life. 

Fortunately, Soga also happens to be the owner of a mil-spec reinforced titanium braincase, and therefore the concussion he received is a fairly mild one. He’ll need a few stitches to fix up the gash in his scalp, and have to stay in the infirmary while micromachines address the minor brain injury. It’ll take less than 12 hours, all told. It’s a good thing, Proto thinks, that Batou isn’t actually handling the postmortem for this training exercise, because he’s come down harder on Higaki than he has on the other recruits recently. Proto feels that it’s a little unfair — if only because Higaki is having to learn more about being an elite operator than the rest of the recruits do. And he’s still head-and-shoulders above most of them on procedural and investigative training exercises. The point of having a diverse recruiting pool, Proto understands it, is that they reinforce each other’s weaknesses with their relative strengths.

“Well?” Saito asks Proto, over cybercomm, as they wait outside for Soga to get stitched back up. 

“Well, what?” Proto says, answering Saito with a question. “You’re senior to me.”

“Yeah, but you’re the one who’s better with training the recruits.” Saito says. “I just signed up to shoot things from very far away, and that’s generally what I do. Soga got assigned to me because he’s a self-starter and might possibly grow into almost as good a sharpshooter as I am, if he survives the next year or two.”

Proto smiles at that. Saito undersells his own effectiveness as a mentor, he thinks. “What happened to looking out for me like a big sibling?”

“Oh, you are not doing the little brother emotional blackmail thing now,” Saito thinks at Proto, just a little exasperated. “Go do your people person routine, and let me fret over Soga for a few minutes.” 

“Fine,” Proto says, without any irritation at all, because Saito is genuinely worried about his mentee. “Keep me updated on his status.” Proto sends a mental request to the Operator androids who help run Section 9 day-to-day, and politely asks them to bring tea and coffee to the briefing room that the other rookies are currently waiting in. They’re all waiting a little glumly for someone to come in and yell at them when Proto arrives at the waiting room, followed shortly by an Operator with a tray of coffee mugs and tea cups in her hands. 

Proto puts a hand up to forestall any movement as he steps in. “Please don’t rise,” he says. “This is a training class, not grade school. You’re not in trouble, and Soga will be fine, he’ll just need a few stitches and a little bit of rest.” 

There’s a little murmur of relief as the coffee and tea gets handed out; there’s nothing like a hot drink for morale even on a muggy summer day, especially when the AC in the HQ tends to be turned just two or three degrees Celsius above “refrigerated”. 

“I’m going to keep this informal since we don’t want to get too far before we can get Soga weighing in as well, so here’s the usual pair of questions: what do you all think you did particularly well today, and what do you think you could have done better?” Proto likes to have his trainees self-assess before he starts praising and correcting them, partly because it gets them thinking of how they could perform better, as opposed to how best they can please him. Self-validation is one of the most important skills anyone can learn.

“Well,” Maven says, “clearing the upstairs went smoothly. We didn’t locate the hostages, though.”

Proto shrugs. “No, you might have,” he points out, “but we halted the exercise before anyone could do so, so it’s not going to count against you this time. Good clean shooting on the upstairs level, incidentally.”

“I uh.” Higaki looks down at his coffee cup, unwilling to meet Proto’s gaze. “I got shot. And Soga got hurt because he was moving to cover me.” 

“That’s not ideal, no,” Proto says, “but the intel you were provided indicates they were using regular hollowpoint ammo. Our body armor is more than enough to stop that, although you’ll be hurting for a bit if you aren’t cyberized.” Proto knows for a fact that Higaki is still mostly flesh — he’s got enhanced eyes and a cyberbrain, and several forensic suites installed. “And sometimes in some situations it’s a calculated risk you have to take. For example, interposing yourself to protect a hostage if you know the opfor’s shots aren’t likely to go through your body armor. But there was nothing wrong with Soga covering you. This is what teamwork is all about. And you moved to cover him when he got slammed into that wall. In a real situation, he would have died if you had not intervened. I’d say you did well to move without hesitation, and disable your opponent.” 

“Anyway,” Kuro says, “training injuries happen because we train hard, at this level. The American Empire’s Delta Force loses a guy a year to training accidents, last I heard. Things like zip-lining, oh, his hand just slips. I don’t know if you’re used to that yet, since you’re a cop, Higaki.”

Higaki frowns, the expression more thoughtful than morose, which is good. No point in burning the rookies out before they actualize their true potential. “No, I hadn’t really thought about that that way.”

“Kuro’s correct,” Proto says with a nod. “The British SBS lost their second-in-command a couple years back, in a HALO diving accident. They had to scrape him off the ground where he landed even with a Class A prosthetic body. This could happen to anyone given how dangerous the job is. And you’re not familiar with some of this, since you came straight to us from the prefectural police. You’re primarily an investigator. You don’t even have riot training. Given all those factors, I think you’re doing very well just to keep up with these experienced operators on your team.”

“Proto,” someone says on Proto’s cybercomm, just as he finishes that statement, and he raises an eyebrow. It’s Togusa. 

“If you’ll excuse me a moment,” Proto tells the trainees, and then he steps out of the briefing room into the hallway to answer. “Yes?”

“Batou and I have talked it over, and we think Higaki might do better under your tutelage for the time being,” Togusa says without preamble. “Would you mind taking him under your wing for a week or two, just to see? Batou can handle Reiko, and from the way you’ve talked about her, I think she can handle him just as well.”

Proto thinks of how superfluous he feels trying to teach Reiko things, and how much Batou demands of Higaki, agrees with that overall assessment. It won’t do any harm, in any case, and could probably do some good for both mentor/trainee pairs involved. “I was going to suggest it, myself. I’ll mention it to the both of them once we’re done with the debriefing. I assume Batou’s filling out the incident report right now.” 

Togusa lets out a sound like a snort. “We can’t let you have all the paperwork fun.”

“All right,” Proto says. 

— 

Reiko takes the mentor swap without any offense at all. Higaki, on the other hand, is demoralized enough that he needs to be told gently, so Proto takes him to the upstairs coffee lounge in the HQ. It’s a nice little place with window-side seats and a good view of the city, but it has the slightly chilly air of a seldom-used place, if only because there really isn’t much need for a room like this when most of the field officers prefer to hang out in the shared staff break room instead. 

“I want to reiterate,” Proto tells him, sensing that the businesslike approach would work best for a detective, “that this is nothing punitive. Batou’s just very military in his thinking and approach, and I am not. And you’ve noticed by now of course that Reiko, as much as I respect her skill and enthusiasm, is something of a handful even for me.”

“She seems to never run out of energy,” Higaki agrees, a little cautiously. They’re both nursing iced glasses of mugicha — a popular summertime beverage made of toasted barley grains infused in water. “If I may speak freely, sir,” he says, and then trails off a bit, uncertain.

“Absolutely,” Proto says, punctuating his own reply with a long draught of tea, to give Higaki time to formulate an answer. 

The worried expression on Higaki’s face gives way to slight embarrassment, a tiny amount of personal guilt. “I don’t know if I should be intimidated by you or not.” 

“Why, because I’m not human?” Proto asks him. Everyone who’s made it past Section 9 selections knows what he is, and this is something he’s been anticipating — that there might be a rookie or two uncomfortable with the idea of a synthetic person walking around.

“No…” Higaki says, trailing off for a second or two, before he speaks up again. “That part makes sense, I guess, if you’ve got AI tanks here, why not an AI field officer? No, that itself doesn’t bother me. You’re just so… polished, I guess. Perfect. Sir.” 

“Polished? Me?” Proto gestures to the t-shirt and climbing pants he’s wearing right now, with a pair of sneakers. An oversized gray chambray shirt hangs open and untucked on his slim body, the sleeves rolled up to bare his pale forearms. Worn this way the overshirt provides ample concealment for his shoulder holster. Proto looks much younger than the late 20s his body was built to resemble when he dresses this casually. Again, it is meant to deflect attention from him, to give onlookers an impression that he couldn’t possibly be worth anyone’s notice. 

Higaki laughs, glances down at his own sport coat, dress shirt, and khakis. “Okay, maybe not today. But yesterday, you looked like you stepped out of a GQ fashion shoot.” Proto senses that Higaki’s anxiety stems from Proto’s synthetic nature, but it’s not an overt distaste. No, it’s the uncanny valley effect combined with the societal expectation that someone with a full prosthetic body is capable of doing far more than someone who hasn’t been cyberized. 

“Oh, that,” Proto says carelessly, aiming to diffuse that impression of his perfection. “That’s because, if you haven’t noticed, I’m also Chief Aramaki’s aide. His first order to me when I was promoted was ‘I suggest you get measured for a suit. A good one.’ We’re just always stuck in meetings surrounded by people who care about formality. Anyway, Togusa’s suggestion isn’t permanent. We’re going to try this out for a week or two, and if you don’t feel comfortable, we can switch back, or we’ll do some musical chairs arrangement and find you a more suitable mentor. This isn’t going to hold you back.”

Higaki nods, clearly reassured. “I guess it’d be weird to ask you, this, then, but do you have any pointers how I can overcome my current lack of skill?”

Another reasonable assumption from a layman, that Proto came into existence programmed with everything he has ever needed to know to be who he is. It would be trivially easy to demonstrate to Higaki that that is not actually true: all Proto needs to do is to feed him some of his cooking mistakes, but that would count as mistreatment of a fellow employee, under current regulations. “That’s not a weird question to ask. I have to learn too, just like everyone else who has ever been part of Section 9.”

“I was also wondering if I should get a prosthetic body.” The ice in Higaki’s mugicha has melted almost entirely, and he’s barely touched his tea. But the tea was there largely as a prop, to set a mood of normalcy and conventionality, to take the sting out of the conversation they’re having. And it’s done its job, if Higaki’s comfortable discussing such personal matters with Proto. 

Proto starts with the last question, because it’s got a less straightforward answer. “I don’t think you have to cyberize any more than you already have, if you don’t want to. It might make the process of adapting easier to some extent, but it might make other things in your life harder. Togusa’s got a cyberbrain and standard-issue audiovisual dampeners so he’s not flash-blinded or deafened in a serious firefight, but that’s it. And he’s our field commander. I can’t advise you on whether it’s a good decision or not. I myself have never known any other body besides the one I have. What I can do is take you down to the training floor over the two weeks I have you, and put you through some additional exercises until you get used to the timing of the flashbangs — it’s easier to anticipate if you’re the one throwing it, which is why Soga reacted faster than you did after it went off. And you’ll get used to it, and used to trusting your audiovisual dampeners, when you practice. You have to spend a lot of time doing it wrong to get good, in any case.” 

“Then I guess we should get started.” Higaki says seriously, before he takes a good gulp of his mugicha. 

“We should,” Proto agrees. “But before I continue torturing you this afternoon, Saito just messaged me over cybercomm. Soga’s already trying to sit up and pissing the infirmary staff off. What do you say about going downstairs to tell him to settle down?”

Higaki laughs a little at that. “What makes you think he’ll listen to me?”

“You saved his bacon back there, he had better,” Proto says with an easy shrug.

— 

Section 9’s infirmary is like the coffee lounge upstairs, rarely used. Most of the veteran field officers are good enough at what they do that they don’t generally get a lot of infirmary time. Either they get through an op with a whole skin, or they get hurt badly enough that they need to get rushed to a JSDF military hospital for treatment. Section 9 likes using military medical facilities in emergencies — the doctors there can be trusted to keep their mouths shut, and they’re much more likely to have experience with gunshot wounds and other severe trauma than the average practicing physician in the average Japanese hospital. 

Soga is laid out on one of the beds and hooked up to an IV, looking thoroughly bored at having to stay there while a diagnostic readout reports on the contents of his concussed braincase. His head is wrapped sufficiently in bandages that he looks a little like a white bunny rabbit — he only lacks the long ears. It’s an incongruous look on someone so competently lethal. “Hey,” he says, just a little loopily, as Higaki and Proto sit down in chairs they drag beside his bed. 

“How are you feeling, Soga?” Higaki asks. Proto remains silent, because what he wants out of this interaction is for Higaki to feel reassured that it was not his fault that Soga got hurt. That was entirely Batou’s slip-up. 

“I’m fine. Just fine. I’d like to get out of bed, but I can’t seem to find my feet.” Soga says with a little laugh. He is lightly sedated right now, mostly to ease the process of micromachine-assisted healing in his braincase, and while he isn’t totally out of his gourd, he’s probably just a little bit beyond its usual boundaries. 

“Which probably means you shouldn’t get out of bed,” Higaki says.

“Spoilsport. I’ve had worse,” Soga says, completely deadpan. “Broke my left leg snowboarding on Mt. Tomamu when I was 15, shattered my collarbone after a rockfall when I was 17. Stepped on a land mine once after I enlisted, which is why I’m fully prosthetic from about here down.” Soga gestures vaguely above his sternum. “Shit happens, man, and I’m used to being the guy it happens to.” 

Higaki winces at that.

Proto knows from Soga’s dossier that his cyberization percentage goes beyond just that, at this point — he’s had both arms replaced as well, due to horrific shrapnel injuries from aforesaid mine and the bones and musculature in what’s left of his torso are reinforced with a micromachine nanoweave to make him stronger, more resistant to injury. There are his Ranger-issue prosthetic eyes, as well. Soga’s also had extensive neural optimization work done to his cyberbrain to steady his movements and allow him to calculate range, windage, and trajectory. He’s not as specialized a sniper as Saito is, not yet, as specializing to that extent brings diminishing returns in the long run, and it’s ultimately Togusa’s call on whether Section 9 needs another AAA-rated sniper, or someone who’s a bit more of a generalist, as Soga currently is. 

“The worst part about this is,” Soga says, not noticing his friend and colleague’s pained expression, “I think I can feel the micromachines fixing my gray matter up. Like… tiny little machine pokes, all through my brain.”

That, at least, provokes a tiny huff of laughter from Higaki. “The brain can’t feel any pain, Soga. It doesn’t have any nerves.”

“Oh,” Soga says. “Okay then, I guess I really do need to stay in bed.”

“Yeah, you do.”

—

It’s near the end of the day and Proto is standing under the shower, scrubbing the smell of gunpowder off his hair and skin in the men’s locker room when the Chief calls him, privately. 

“Proto,” Chief Aramaki says, just as Proto is washing the suds off his hair, “could you stay behind tonight? I need you for a private meeting.”

“Yes, Chief,” Proto says, since he doesn’t have anything planned for the evening. “Shall I ask Higaki to stay as well?” The Chief has been notified of the switch in mentorship by now, because it was Togusa’s decision, and Togusa is rather more by-the-book than the Major was. 

“No,” Chief Aramaki says. “He’s not cleared for this.”

That surprises Proto, since the trainees are all cleared to sit in on Cabinet meetings if required to. That clearance is of course highly dependent on need-to-know — someone cleared for something may not actually get to know about it if they don’t need to know anything about it. “I see. How formally should I dress, sir?”

“One of your suits should do,” the Chief says with a little chuckle. “In absolute truth if you were to dress appropriately in strictest etiquette we’d have to put you in a kimono. And I’d have to wear one, too. We don’t have the time to do that, and I haven’t worn a kimono since I was married a very long time ago.”

Now Proto is truly curious about the nature of the meeting they’re headed to. A clandestine location, highly classified, but traditional enough that kimono would be expected of delegates? That’s not anything he can identify to date.... unless it had something to do with the Imperial family? Doubtful. Formal suits would be adequate in that situation. “Understood, sir.”

“Meet me in the parking garage at 5:25PM.”

“Yes, sir.”

— 

They make the trip in Proto’s work vehicle, a silver-gray Mazda RX-8, instead of any other of the fleet cars, if only because the Chief did not specify which vehicle Proto was to use, and it’s just the two of them. While the RX-8 is technically a four-door vehicle, the internal dimensions are such that anyone wanting to ride in the back seat will either have to be a small child, or have to remove their lower legs first, especially with the driver’s seat pushed far enough back to accommodate Proto’s height and length of leg. 

It’s a little frustrating at first getting out of Niihama City — there are still enough people heading for outlying suburbs in this rush hour traffic that they crawl, incrementally, up until they get closer to city limits, and then the Chief tells Proto to take the old Kobe route eastwards. He has not yet told Proto where they are going, or the address they are going to, and Proto is negotiating this entirely on his own, without relying on GPS. 

The RX-8 leaps forward once they hit the highway, no longer constrained to start-and-stop city driving, and Proto keeps a careful foot on the accelerator, because the Chief is sitting to his left and he can’t show off too much like this. This is something old and familiar and, oddly comforting, dating back to his earlier days at Section 9, where he’d pinch-hit as the Chief’s driver and aide when the field officers were all busy doing something else. And it’s something he’s continued to do as the Chief’s current aide, if the meetings they’re going to are close enough that driving is possible. 

The Chief sits silent and thoughtful in the passenger seat, his gaze fixed on the horizon even as Proto keeps his eyes on the road and the drivers around him. There is nothing, as they say, more foolhardy and stupid as a Niihama City driver trying to get home. The highway roads are steamy and wet from a typical summer cloudburst, and the scent of petrichor surrounds Proto, almost nauseating in its strength and intensity as he lets up on the accelerator to negotiate the wet stretches of road. There’s enough water coming down in this brief, intense storm that Proto downshifts to maximize purchase on the rain-slick blacktop, using an old rally driver’s trick that is now a part of offensive and defensive driving technique for police and public security officers. 

He feathers off the gas carefully and then applies the brakes with the ball of his foot, ready to pivot. Then he depresses the clutch with his other foot and rotates his leg so he’s hitting both the gas and brakes with the same foot, applying pressure until his transmission speed matches his road speed. That done, he shifts from 5th to neutral, lets up on the clutch and taps lightly on the gas with his heel, before he taps the clutch again, shifts to 4th gear, and releases the clutch finally. 

The double heel-toe shift he has just performed is a complicated maneuver, but a useful one in bad weather or in difficult conditions, or when taking a tight corner in a high-speed pursuit. He doesn't strictly need to do this, it's just fun to practice something difficult just for the sheer pleasure of pulling it off. The cars around him are slowing down too, albeit less gracefully than he has, and the highway traffic drops to below 50km/h. More than one foolhardy driver tries to keep going at above 60km/h, and one of them hydroplanes briefly before they manage to slow down and find purchase with their tires. This is possibly the worst part of driving the Chief around — having to worry about the other relative idiots on the road who seem to use their hood ornaments like Proto would use a gun sight. 

Proto has become very attached to the RX-8, so much so that he’s considering buying it from the Section 9 fleet and having it titled under his name. But the pain of having it totaled in an accident would pale in comparison to the shame of being the field officer responsible for the mess if the Chief were injured along with him, especially since Niihama City drivers don’t seem to steer as much as just aim their cars and hit the gas. 

There is another reason that Proto hasn’t bought his work car outright — RX-8s, even the late model ones, are prone to apex seal blowout if poorly handled. This is not a problem for Proto, who likes to drive his Mazda carefully and well, and is meticulous about maintenance in general. But it’s also a lot easier to optimize a Wankel rotary if one has access to Section 9’s fabrication labs, given the general scarcity of parts, and Proto can’t rightly conscience using those resources on a personal vehicle. 

“Merge onto Route 24 just ahead, Proto,” the Chief says, after ten fraught minutes negotiating the heavy summer rain and Proto blinks, does so. They’re headed for Nara, looks like, and for the life of him, Proto cannot remember anything particularly important situated in Nara. The Chief would have driven himself if this were a personal visit to an old friend or connection, and Proto’s presence implies official business. But official business that the Chief has told nobody else at Section 9 about? That’s not something Proto is generally used to. 

— 

Proto has driven for more than 90 minutes, having turned off Route 24 just shy of Nara City proper onto an off-ramp that leads them into suburban, and then gently rural territory — the shadows have lengthened in the silence after the thunderstorm, and the first shadows of evening have begun to encroach upon the golden glow of sunlight now that they’ve driven out from under the clouds. The RX-8 purrs quietly down back roads surrounded either by the bright emerald green of rice paddies, or the dappled quiet of orchards and woodland. Small farmhouses dot the landscape here and there, light shining out of their windows here and there, and Proto has to slow down at one point to let a doe and her fawn cross the road ahead of him. 

It’s a beautiful, orderly, deeply serene landscape, and Proto finds himself drinking it all in, the shrilling of cicadas and the calls of birds in well-tended persimmon and chestnut groves. He’s not sure if he could live here away from the city, no — not even if he didn’t have his duties to fulfil at Section 9, but it’s almost restorative driving through here. He takes a left at a fork in the road, and then a right, and another left, to approach a walled rural villa. No, he thinks, as they draw closer. It’s not a single villa but rather, a compound with several buildings within.

The buildings within are built in the sukiya-zukuri style, a spare, austere aesthetic designed not to stand out, but rather, to be quietly sophisticated, partaking of the landscape they sit in, and to draw from the resources of said landscape. The compound is not quite ancient, nor is it even antique — most of the buildings, according to Proto’s enhanced vision, have been augmented with the latest in security technology, and his vision picks out two or three discreet turret ports on a cursory scan. The shoji screens serving as windows and doors are not made just of wood and paper, but are rather whole panels of armored polymer laminates with an ornamental cladding built to hide their nature. 

This isn’t just a villa, Proto realizes. It’s a facility. He slows the RX-8 to a halt in front of the security gates in front of the compound and waits, and Chief Aramaki pulls his phone out and makes a quick, discreet call, presumably to someone inside. “I have arrived,” he says, and no more. The gates slide open slowly, ponderously, to admit the RX-8, and Proto pulls slowly in, to the small parking space in front of the main building in the compound. The Chief gets out of the RX-8 the moment Proto parks, and he pulls the keys from the ignition and scrambles out, locking up with a quick press of the keyfob. 

Someone has emerged from the main building to greet them. They, at first glance, are a young woman, her straight black hair cut in a short, asymmetrical bob. Proto notes that she’s probably in her mid-20s, her build minimal, athletic under the men’s kimono and hakama she’s wearing, and that she hasn’t got an inch of skin showing except for her face. She’s wearing a close-fitting garment under her kimono and juban, something like a whole body glove in a dark material that covers her hands, all the way up her forearms, and also her feet, under her tabi socks and straw zori. The collar of the garment goes up her neck, terminating just beneath the jawline, and the tab of a zipper gleams at the hollow of her throat, resting beneath a hook-and-eye closure.

She opens her mouth as though to say something, as the Chief emerges from the car, and then blinks abruptly as her pupils swivel in her eyes, to fix on Proto. “I can’t read you,” she says. 

Proto pauses, tilts his head, and the young woman seems to remember herself. She takes a step backwards and bows, formally, to both Proto and the Chief. “Good evening,” she says, slipping into a more formal register of Japanese. “I apologize for my prior confusion. My name is Tsunagi, and Bureau Chief Isayama has asked me to escort you, Section Chief Aramaki, to the meeting room.”

Chief Aramaki returns Tsunagi’s bow as a superior does, at slightly less of an incline and for a briefer duration, but Proto returns her bow as an equal, with grave formality. Proto isn’t sure yet what exactly they’re going into, but he’s heard enough rumors to form some suspicions, and he thinks on those suspicions as he and the Chief slip their shoes off just inside the building, just as Tsunagi steps out of her zori, and they both follow her further in. 

The average layman would consider any suggestion of ESP or other psychic ability to be tabloid fodder, and so would most public security field officers, for the most part. But various urban legends and clandestine rumors have circulated around the most secret echelons of Japan’s state security apparatuses. Those rumors purport the existence of a Psychic Bureau, an additional, highly classified agency under the purview of various ministries, depending on who’s responsible for the rumor. The Ministry of Home Affairs is a popular one, as is the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. 

Proto has no real confirmation yet, but he suspects that he is currently being allowed to glimpse the truth behind the veil: that the Psychic Bureau exists, and that Tsunagi is one of its operatives. 

Tsunagi escorts Proto and the Chief to an inner room, its air sweet and hazy with incense smoke, floored with green-gold tatami mats. Zabuton, small square cushions, have been placed for four people, and there is a small, old man seated on one of them, in perfect seiza. He is clad also in full kimono, and a cool, curious little smile spreads across his face as he glances up at the Chief, and then at Proto. There are no greetings, no pleasantries, it seems. Tsunagi takes up position behind her Bureau Chief just as Proto does behind Chief Aramaki, and the shop talk begins, just like that. 

“He’s the first,” Isayama says, as though commenting on the first rainfall in this summer season, or the first catch of sweetfish this month. Isayama’s eyes are uncommonly dark, piercing, and his pupils seem to drink light as he gives Proto a careful, searching look.

“Indeed he is,” Chief Aramaki says in reply, “not the first one working at our section, to be sure, but the first of his type, and the sole survivor. The others were lost seven months ago.” The Chief, Proto realizes, is talking about sapient AI. They are discussing him, and the late Tachikomas.

“Hm. I see nothing,” Isayama says, looking away from Proto’s face at last, “but an untaught man will see nothing and claim an absence of something, without realizing he does not yet have the instruments by which to perceive it. Tsunagi. What do you see?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” Tsunagi says, with a brief, sly glance upward at Proto. “A handsome man.” Tsunagi uses the slang phrase “ikemen” here as opposed to the more conventional “bidanshi”, which amuses Proto inwardly — ”ikemen” has the rough connotation of “stud”, and is used to denote a man who is carelessly chic, at once reserved and passionate. Proto isn’t sure he actually fits all the pop culture criteria as some of them contradict each other, but it’s flattering, at least. He blames the suit he’s currently wearing. 

Isayama chuckles once in reply, a sound vaguely like a rusty hinge. “There have been more emergences, on our end,” he says, apropos of nothing. “Nothing you need worry yourself about, Aramaki. They’re all too young to work for you, yet.” 

Aramaki lets out a small grunt. “And you would let your precious students work with my men at Section 9?”

“Only when they are ready,” Isayama says, “and none have been found sufficiently prepared for public security work. Tsunagi is the most promising among them, however.” Tsunagi blinks in brief consternation, and Proto realizes that she’s probably being left out of as much of the conversation as he’s missing. They exchange a brief rueful glance between them — Chiefs and their tendency to speak in riddles — and it’s a surprising moment of accord.

“If you would wait outside for us, Proto?” Chief Aramaki says quietly, and Proto rises from his seat on the floor and bows solemnly to Bureau Chief Isayama, before heading out the sliding shoji doorway. Tsunagi rises half a minute after, bows silently herself, and joins Proto out in the hallway, and they stand side by side outside, guarding their respective masters within. 

“So you’re not human,” Tsunagi murmurs, very very quietly to Proto. “And I heard Chief Aramaki call you Proto, is that right?”

“No, and yes,” Proto says very simply. No point in hiding it, if both his Chief and hers have been so plain-spoken about it. There’s an odd quality in the air in this building, somewhat akin to standing in a cool evening fog, or listening to a white noise generator. He can sense, at the very edges of his perceptions, changes in the air, or a shift in the atmosphere, but it is not anything that shows on his sensors or diagnostics. He thinks to what Isayama said earlier, about lacking the instruments by which to perceive something.

“It’s nice to meet you, Proto,” Tsunagi says, again, just above a whisper. “I’ve always wanted to say that to a first new something or someone. Like an alien, or I guess an AI, in your case.”

“And you’re the first psychic I’ve ever met,” Proto says, matching her in volume when he speaks. “Nice to meet you too, Tsunagi.” Proto is not generally given to gossiping with the members of other security entourages while he waits for the Chief to exit private discussions, but this isn’t gossip, is it? 

Tsunagi is just greeting him, albeit in a more friendly, casual manner than he’d expected at first. He’s not sure how to react to her at this point. He thinks that he could find things to like about her if he knew her better, but that’s how Proto feels about most people in any case. Some of his peers at Section 9 think he is being overly optimistic about humanity, but he would rather die from optimism than live in pessimism. 

Neither of them says anything for a few minutes, and then Tsunagi shifts and slips her hand out of an opening in the wrist of her sleeve, then pushes it up her forearm. “I know this is going to be a weird request,” she says to Proto, “but could I hold your hand? Just for a moment.” Proto notices then that she has tattoos all over what he can see of her forearm, both on the outside and the inside of her wrist, and on the palms of her hands as well. The tattoos are made up of elaborate geometrics and arabesques that Proto can’t quite identify, and a single eye stares up from the middle of Tsunagi’s right palm, set in an equilateral triangle.

Proto blinks and tips his head to the side, curious, but he can see no harm in complying, so he holds his left hand out over the doorway, palm up, fingers slightly curved. Tsunagi places her hand in his — it’s not very small, because she’s not all that tiny, and she has an angular palm and long, graceful fingers. Her hand is warm in his, and he curls his fingers over hers reflexively. He can feel the raised lines of Tsunagi’s tattoos where his fingertips rest on the back of her hand, and he waits as she closes her eyes for a second, and then another. 

Then Tsunagi sighs, shakes her head as though waking from a daydream, and lets go of Proto’s hand. Proto lets his hand fall back to his side and watches from his side of the doorway as Tsunagi tugs her sleeve back down and slips her hand back into the fingers of the glove built into her sleeve. She finds each finger sheath effortlessly in an economy of movement that suggests she’s worn gloves most of her life, and settles the sleeve of her kimono back over her forearm once she’s put her glove back on. 

“Nothing,” she says, as though that would make particular sense to Proto, a vague, secretive smile spreading over her lips. The gesture ought to be slightly unnerving, and yet it is not, if only because she looks truly childlike in this moment. Innocent, Proto thinks. Carefree, almost, and certainly very sad.

“Nothing?” Proto asks her. 

“You’re the first person I’ve touched bare-handed,” Tsunagi says, “since I was four or five. Thank you.”

— 

Proto’s thoughts linger on Tsunagi’s strangeness as he pulls out of the compound and through the gate, the Chief seated safely beside him. The sun has set and the fireflies are out in their customary numbers, blinking brightly in the velvety dark beyond the headlights of the RX-8. This is the first time Proto has seen live fireflies in his life — they don’t generally live in large numbers near a major conurbation like Niihama City, and are easily drowned out by light pollution besides. But they seem to thrive here in rural Nara prefecture, and he is surrounded by galaxies of blinking golden lights as the miniscule creatures call to each other in their silent entreaties of love.

Love. Psychologists call it attachment, and it’s so vital to humans that human infants deprived of attachment figures fail to thrive. Proto can’t imagine being unable to touch anyone, even in the casual, limited contact he has with others day-to-day at Section 9. And Japanese childhoods are particularly tactile. In the past mothers carried their infants in slings on their backs, and the children would learn the shifts in balance required to execute a proper bow from the movement of their mothers’ torsos, and imbibe that basic etiquette in their mothers’ milk, as it were. Even in contemporary times there’s still a certain emphasis given to nonsexual and social nudity and touch, such as in onsen and sento shared baths. Children under 8 are still permitted, by Japanese law, to share a public bath with their parents. To have been deprived of skin-to-skin contact from such an early age feels somewhat unfair to Proto. But then it’s not as though he even had a childhood in the first place, having been programmed to enter human society as an adult. 

A glance at the dashboard tells Proto that the RX-8 is running low on gasoline, he will have to top it up. He’s also starting to feel hungry, and he wonders if the Chief is, too. 

“We’ll have to stop at a gas station, sir,” Proto says, “before I take us back to Niihama City. Would you like me to stop for dinner as well?”

“Hm,” the Chief grunts noncommittally, “perhaps. Nothing too formal. Ramen will do.” 

“Yes, sir,” Proto says. They’re still on the smaller back roads, but Proto remembers passing by a gas station with an attached konbini right by a farmer’s market, and he can fill the gas tank there before resuming their journey Niihama City-ward, and find a place to have dinner on the way back. 

“I’m sorry if you felt as though you were on exhibit, incidentally,” Chief Aramaki says to Proto, apropos of nothing, as they drive past a low farmhouse. Warm light shines out from the windows against the deepening night, and the peace and serenity of the countryside now feels subtly foreign to Proto, an outsider passing through in his car. It’s not an overt sense of unfriendliness he feels, as much as a certainty that he is a creature of the city and its sleepless 24-hour rhythms. 

“It was a bit odd, yes,” Proto says, choosing his words carefully, “but thank you for thinking about my feelings, sir. I suppose you wanted me to come along to this meeting for a purpose.” 

“The Psychic Bureau has largely confined itself to safeguarding and shepherding the few psychics who exist in this country. Training them and giving them a safe place to live away from the minds of others, if that is necessary. It varies from psychic to psychic, as I understand it. They have only interfered once in policy in the last hundred years, and their warning was sadly ignored.” The Chief’s face is reflected faintly in the windshield and the passenger-side mirror, distorted, ghostly.

“When was that, sir?” Proto asks, genuinely curious about the incident Chief Aramaki has alluded to.

“They tried to warn the Cabinet about the nuclear bombing of Tokyo in 2003, two years before it actually occurred. None of us who were privy to the knowledge believed it could happen, of course. And then today I received a phone call from old Isayama saying that he knew we at Section 9 had succeeded in creating a sapient AI, and that he would like to meet you, please. He asked for you by name. By your legal name. That is not something he is privy to.” 

Proto blinks, unsure of how to reply. There are many ways someone can fake a prophecy, and the easiest way to do so is to be sufficiently vague and confusing in one’s prophecies that future readers can slot in whatever event they wish into the prophecy and claim the benefits of apophenia. That’s how Nostradamus sounds so convincing. But Chief Aramaki is not a man who is generally given to superstition or magical thinking. 

“I want you to understand,” the Chief explains further, “each incoming Prime Minister is told of the existence of the Psychic Bureau after they are sworn in, and each one generally has the same question afterwards. ‘Why, if the Psychic Bureau exists, can they not advise me on the best course to take in the future’?”

Proto thinks for a few nanoseconds, and does not turn his head when he answers the Chief. “Because the answer would depend heavily on how you would interpret the ‘best course’ to be.”

“Exactly, Proto. Which is why I brought you here. I’m a strong man for my age, thankfully hale. Life has not stricken me with infirmity in body nor in mind, yet. But I cannot be here to guide Section 9 forever.”

“That is why you’re expanding the ranks, sir. For futurity’s sake.” It makes all kinds of sense, given how Section 9 was hindered in the last year by its small numbers. The loss of a single field officer to injury or death has had a disproportionate impact on team performance and overall strategy because there were so few of them. But now Proto realizes that the Chief is expanding the ranks not just to cover Section 9’s weaknesses, but also to find future candidates for leadership positions. The Major is gone, and Batou had refused the promotion to field commander, leaving Togusa to step up in Major Kusanagi’s absence. 

“Yes, Proto. Futurity,” the Chief says in agreement. “Tell me, Proto, if I were to die of a sudden stroke or heart attack tonight, in my sleep, what do you foresee for Section 9?”

“If I were to be absolutely frank, sir,” Proto says, after having mulled that question over for a minute or two, because it is truly a complex and difficult question, “our problem right now is that we have very capable field officers, but insufficient policy-minded people in our ranks, and we’d have that problem even if the Major were still leading us. Togusa is right now shaping up to be a good leader, but he lacks experience. We’d be a gun without a wielding hand and an aiming eye.”

“Exactly,” the Chief says. “That’s why you’re my aide now.”

“Sir.” Proto tries to come up with a reply using his broad and capable cognition, but cannot. 

“I had hoped to groom Togusa for the position of Section Chief — and he still might rise to such heights in the future, I don’t know. Life is, if anything, unpredictable. But the Section Chief cannot be the same person as the field commander — they need to take a more distant, detached view of how we do things as an organization. And Togusa, brave, loyal, and capable as he is, is perhaps incapable of the amount of detachment required to make the kinds of gambles and sacrifices a Section Chief will have to make. What makes him such a very good leader at Section 9 will also destroy him if he has to play the cynical game of politics, because he can’t not care. Not on a personal level.” Proto is oddly frightened of the implications of Chief Aramaki’s statement. 

Proto is not sure he ever wants to lead Section 9 in the future, not as the Section Chief. “Sir,” he says, letting his unease show, because he trusts the Chief, “I don’t know if it’s possible for me to ever fill your shoes.”

“You haven’t tried them on yet, Proto,” Chief Aramaki says with a tired nod. “And I know there’s the issue of your legal personhood, and whether the Cabinet would accept you as Section Chief were I to retire and put you forward as my replacement. But you can still be a loyal aide to whoever winds up having to warm my chair in the future, and furnish them with the benefit of your experience and expertise.” 

Proto finds this rather more reasonable, but he knows that Chief Aramaki himself wasn’t given much of a choice when he began leading Section 9. Such things are not as much privileges as responsibilities, and very weighty ones as that. “I understand, sir.” 

The Chief sighs. “It’s of course a risk, like any other. But we cannot let a risky present cut us off from all future hope. Nothing we do today will matter in a hundred years, but we won’t have that hundred years unless we plan for it. Perhaps it will still matter to you, since you weren’t created to live a set lifespan. You could still be around then, if you want to be.”

Proto knows he’s an optimistic person, because he was programmed to be one, but he thinks that might be rather more optimistic than even his broadest estimations, if only because he also spends an uncomfortable percentage of his work experience being shot at by hostiles. “And if I’m not, sir?”

“Then it won’t be your problem any more, will it?” Chief Aramaki asks, with a little shrug.

That makes Proto smile, and he fights a brief chuckle at the thought. “No, sir,” he says. “If I may ask, sir, what is Bureau Chief Isayama trying to do?”

“The Psychic Bureau does not generally supply anyone with explanations of why they do what they do,” the Chief says, “but I think that Isayama was trying to warn us in a roundabout fashion that he foresees something in the future that is so massive, so disruptive that the Psychic Bureau will have no choice but to intervene, instead of just issuing warnings that will not be heeded by short-sighted politicians.”

That’s perhaps the most sensible way of interpreting events thus far, Proto thinks, even as he considers the fact that others might be more prone to believing what the Psychic Bureau had to say by way of warning if they actually gave rational explanations for why they did what they did. “And that young woman, Tsunagi. She’s being groomed to take up a position at Section 9.” 

“Yes, as a field officer. She’s quite well trained, at this point, with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and multiple certifications in forensic science. There are several accommodations we would have to make, of course, but I believe the benefits of having her on our staff will outweigh the inconveniences.”

“Will she make it, you think, Chief?” 

“We won’t know until she joins our ranks and enters training, and that won’t happen for months yet,” the Chief says. “Eight recruits is all we have the expertise to mentor and train right now. Perhaps late this year or early next year, after this current crop of recruits settle into their permanent duties.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Proto negotiates domestic boundaries with a visiting cat, personal boundaries with more than one rookie, and international boundaries with the son of a fallen dictator.

It’s been almost two weeks since Soga had his scalp split open by 300 kilos of angry combat android, and Proto is feeling particularly pleased with his life to date. He’s managed to finish assembling all the furniture in his new apartment at last, and last night was the first night he has managed to spend in his new bed. He can be as comfortable on a bare concrete floor as he is on his roomy new bed simply by turning his senses of touch and temperature off, but it’s nice to have a mattress and sheets again and to relegate the sleeping bag to the bottom of his closet.

Now if only he could figure out where that cat keeps coming from. Proto has taken up gardening in recent months, part of his random search for a good hobby, and has kept to it as much as his work permits. He tends succulents and cacti, which deal well with being ignored for a few days if he winds up having to spend the night at the HQ, and fusses over a variety of tiny life after dinner each evening. Most of the plants currently live out on his new apartment’s generous balcony space, given the sunny summer weather, but he’ll have to bring them back inside come the cooler days of autumn. That is fine. None of his plants have grown enough to warrant a pot that cannot be moved easily indoors.

A strange cat has taken to showing up on Proto’s balcony from time to time, sometimes daring to intrude upon him even while he’s standing there conversing with his plants. It’s a beautiful calico with odd eyes — one blue and one gold, and it seems well-fed, but wears no collar. The cat is clearly used to humans, but not really fond of personal interaction. His attempts to pat it have been greeted with hisses, swift, evasive movement, and further observation from a distance. As the cat is doing no harm to his small plant collection, Proto leaves it be, and some nights they sit in companionable silence together, when he decides to enjoy the cooling evening air. 

Proto presumes that the cat is climbing to his balcony via the balconies of neighboring apartments — he’s four floors up, however, which makes him wonder how it gets up here in the first place. Perhaps it belongs to someone on his level and comes out through an open balcony door, to explore. He personally isn’t sure, and he doesn’t actually spend enough time at home to track its movements. But it’s a welcome guest, and he’s started putting out a water bowl for it, in case it might be thirsty during the day. 

This morning Proto finds the cat sitting on the seat of the chair he keeps out on the balcony. Its paws are tucked under its torso in loaf configuration, and it watches him through the sliding glass door as he finishes his usual breakfast meal bar. He hasn’t the time to say hi at this point in time, not when he has to negotiate rush-hour traffic to work, so he doesn’t wave. Instead he checks the fit and hang of his overshirt, to make sure his sidearm and holster are concealed, and kneels to put on a pair of high-top canvas sneakers, and then he heads out of the door. 

Several of Proto’s neighbors are heading out at the same time, and he nods briefly to them, exchanges greetings on the way to the parking garage. He’s gotten used to most of them as people in this neighborhood are slightly friendlier than the people in his previous one. They’re not as warm or friendly as the neighbors one might make after buying a home in the suburbs around Niihama City, no doubt, but people are less on their guard here, given that it’s a nicer part of town. The couple next door have an adorable little girl who waves shyly at him from behind her mother’s back when they pass by each other on the way to school and work respectively, and he’s learned to tune the sounds of her enthusiastic (if unskilled) recorder practice out by now. 

Some people might be annoyed at having to live with the sounds of others’ lives unfolding around them, the hints of their domesticity and drama, arguments and aerobics sessions and piano lessons, but Proto finds it comforting and a reminder of what his work at Section 9 is ultimately about. He was programmed, built, and trained to do what he does so that his neighbors can live in peace and ignorance around him. He doesn’t view his work as a personal sacrifice on his part — it is what it is, since it is his purpose, and he doesn’t think his responsibilities entitle him to any special privileges in society. But it’s pleasant to stay in touch with ordinary people and remember what he’s doing all this for. 

—

Proto stops at the front desk at the lobby of the fictitious security company Section 9 uses as a front on the way up from the parking garage, because he’s got mail to pick up. This is the first time, in fact, that he’s ever received mail at work, because he prefers to keep the polite fiction of his legal identity between himself and his employment at Section 9 most of the time. This mail has come from an insider, however, someone who knows of Section 9’s existence, and specifically, of his nature as an AI as well, which is why he is receiving it here at work. 

Proto signs for the registered mail at the front desk and receives a brown manila envelope in return, and he thanks the courier and the android Operators posing as receptionists before he turns to go back upstairs. In the elevator he uses his multitool to slit the envelope open and smiles with satisfaction as he peruses its contents — contained within is a single encrypted data disc, readable only through proprietary software, and any readers will have to authenticate their identities and clearances on a secret government database to actually be able to read it. It’s something he requested his father, Dr. Akio Asuda, to send him two weeks ago, and it has finally arrived. 

Written in marker on the cover of the data disc is a short message, and it reads: _Dr. Reiko Fujiwara, I look forward to your comments on my life’s work. If you have any further questions on Hajime’s cognition, you may ask me instead. LEAVE MY SON ALONE._ It’s even charmingly autographed in passive-aggressive fashion. 

Proto wants to grin, even if it would be a little ungraceful given the circumstances. He’s not someone who likes to lean on family connections to get things done. But Dr. Asuda would ultimately be the best person to field many of Reiko’s enthusiastic questions about how exactly Proto does anything, if only because it’s exhausting to have to dissect everything he does just to explain to a curious human how exactly he sees the world. 

He gets out of the elevator on the office level and saunters to the rookies’ shared desk space, made up of cubicles separated by half-walls, so they can converse with each other while they handle paperwork. Reiko is at her desk with a slushy something in a clear plastic cup before her, and she’s plugged into a portable terminal, her gaze absent, detached. She’s probably reading, so Proto walks quietly up to her desk and waits until she finds a stopping point, the disc in his hands. 

“Good morning, Reiko,” Proto says, once she looks expectantly up at him. “I have something you might be interested in.”

“Mm?” Reiko picks her condensation-beaded plastic cup up and takes a long slurp at its contents, dabs at her lips with a paper napkin. Proto hands the disc over to her. Reiko glances at the message written to her on the disc’s cover, and at Dr. Asuda’s signature beneath, and twitches, blinks in consternation. She would blush, Proto thinks, if she wasn’t 98% prosthetic at this point. 

“I —” she begins to say, and then thinks better of it. “Wait.”

Proto waits, his facial expression carefully neutral. 

“Dr. Asuda really is your dad, huh?” A strange expression is spreading over Reiko’s face, a blend of discomfort and growing awareness. 

Proto shrugs. “I’ve known no other.” That’s the only answer that can encompass their relationship, Proto thinks — how do you explain to someone who has the parents they had simply by an accident of pair-bonding and biology, the bond that occurs when you realize the person who created you after incredible amounts of time and labor loves you too, and welcomes you to this world? “Father” is the best word Proto has found thus far, but he thinks sometimes that it is inadequate. 

Reiko puts the disc down on her desk, looks at the scratched top of her desk, at the disc, at the melting drink in its plastic cup sitting on a soggy napkin — everywhere but Proto’s face, before she speaks again. “I guess I was too enthusiastic about working with you.”

“You were,” Proto says firmly but gently. “But that disc should answer most of your questions, as far as they can be answered in any case. Just because I know what’s going on in my head doesn’t mean I can still explain every single thought that passes through my mind. And it’d be exhausting to expect anyone to constantly explain themselves. I don’t owe you that.”

Reiko takes a deep breath, thinking about how Proto has just stated his personal boundaries. Proto can see how she’s torn between the options of explaining herself defensively and just apologizing, and he continues to watch her as her decision tips one way, and then the other. “I understand,” she says, swallowing her pride. “I’m so very sorry. I really wasn’t thinking about that, and I should have.”

“Apology accepted,” Proto says smoothly, glad that she’s decided to be gracious, at least. “Let’s just start over, shall we?” 

“Yes, I’d like that.” Reiko nibbles thoughtfully on her lower lip, as though thinking about something, and the next thing she says to him comes on a private, encrypted channel on cybercomm. “Proto. About Higaki…”

“Is there a problem?” Proto asks her silently. “I didn’t ask for you to be reassigned to Batou because I was annoyed with you, incidentally. It’s more that Higaki needs a mentor who’s less military-minded.”

“Nooo, it’s not about that,” Reiko says. “I’m cool with Batou and I’m not mad with you. I just… don’t know if it’s appropriate to say, but I think it might also be inappropriate to not say it.”

Proto raises an eyebrow, waits as Reiko pauses to take another slurp of her frozen coffee confection. 

“I think Higaki is sprouting a crush on you,” Reiko thinks at Proto, over the encrypted channel. “You probably want to head that off ASAP.”

That could be a problem, yes. “I will if that’s the case, but why do you think so?” Proto considers his options, but he also wonders what led Reiko to that conclusion. He’s going to have to be careful about defusing things, just in case it’s a false positive on her part. 

“I, uh,” Reiko looks briefly mortified, and then barges through the rest of the sentence bravely, nevertheless. “It’s just something I know on a gut level, I can’t fully explain why. But being the resident disaster bisexual of this cohort, it’s something I’ve done before and regretted each time, so I thought I’d bring it up to you just in case it was happening so you can address it as a trainer before it gets to the point where anyone does anything they regret.”

Proto raises an eyebrow, lets a small, teasing smile pull up the corner of his mouth. “‘Regretted each time,’ implying that you didn’t learn your lesson the first time around. Reiko, you impress me.”

Reiko squeezes her eyes tightly shut, squirms in her chair a little. “Stop teasing me, I’m still embarrassed about my youthful stupidity.”

“I will,” Proto says, dropping the smile and the archness from his expression. “Thank you for the heads up.”

— 

Proto is smart enough and careful enough to not rush immediately off to Higaki with his suspicions. For one, that would easily expose Reiko as his informant if Higaki were to put two and two together and also take offense. No, he waits and watches instead, opting to sit in on a seminar on ballistic forensics that an expert from the National Police Agency is giving that afternoon. Togusa and Paz are sitting in as well, so it’s not even as though Proto’s participation is any bit out of place, even if the seminar is being given for the benefit of the rookies in the first place. 

Proto likes to sit in on these seminars because he uses them to practice his drawing skills — he took drawing up shortly after he had resolved the Shibata case in January this year, in his endless search for a hobby, and has stuck with it. Drawing intrigues Proto because it’s something that comes very naturally to him. As he understands it, humans learn early as children to draw what other people expect them to see, simplifying their visual memory into easily comprehensible logograms — a stick figure of a man, a stick figure with a triangle skirt for a woman, a rectangle with wheels for a bus. And it takes artists of any sort years of practice and unlearning to fully access their visual memories again. 

Proto has the opposite problem. With constant reliable access to his visual memory and flawless control of his shell, Proto’s drawings are all consistent, photo-accurate, but they all look like someone has just fed a photograph through a pencil-drawing filter on a powerful image editing suite. There is no irregularity and inconsistency to it, none of the little tremors and characteristics betraying a human hand behind the work. 

So Proto has to learn drawing backwards in a way, and learn to elide what he sees. To that end he makes himself rely on impressions, doing tiny thumbnails and small lightning portraits, if only because both those decisions force a conservation of detail that creates a more irregular, hand-drawn feel to his artwork. He has managed, in the past few months, to teach himself to stylize, and to draw what he thinks others want to see. And it is a delight to stretch his mind and skills that way, and especially so to draw unfamiliar faces — Proto never draws any of his colleagues and companions because his sketchbook would then become a security risk. But guest instructors from the non-classified branches of the military and police are fair game if he doesn’t name them, and keeps the drawings vague enough of context and setting that it could just be a random person standing in front of a projection screen.

Sometimes, if he’s in a whimsical mood, he fills the screen they’re standing next to with doodles that are completely unrelated to whatever the seminar is being given on, just for entertainment value. Today he fills the space around this guest lecturer with his approximation of cute animal mascot designs. Small improbably adorable combinations of pandas and cats. Little snub-nosed raccoon-dogs in tuxedos and spats. He’s become very good at mimicking the house style of a certain famous stationery designer that sells largely to grade-school girls and older women in a state of arrested development.

This sort of class is where Higaki stands head and shoulders above the rest of his cohort — he’s been formally trained in investigation and forensic science, so he anticipates the guest instructor’s questions and answers faster and more accurately than any of the others save for Maven, who used to do police work with the Fukuoka prefectural police. Nevertheless his expertise exceeds hers, which is one of the reasons he was picked to join Section 9. Proto would have liked Reiko’s suspicions to merely be wishful thinking, but it is clear that they are not, and something is indeed afoot. 

The tells are all there, very subtle and suppressed, but there nevertheless. Higaki keeps sneaking glances out his peripheral vision, but he won’t meet Proto’s gaze directly — something Proto had attributed to shyness, perhaps traces of the inferiority complex noted in his psych profile. It’s something someone would do around an instructor who intimidated them, nevertheless. But Proto possesses rather more acute and accurate vision than the average person, which means that he notices even miniscule clues like pupillary dilation, which is involuntary, and increased blood flow to the face and neck — that is, the beginnings of an agitated flush. 

Now, mydriasis can be an indication of several things: drug use, fight-flight response activation, cognitive load or demand, or emotional and physical arousal. It’s effortless to rule out most of the other positives via a lack of other correlating signs. Reiko, a trained physician, would have noticed Higaki’s responses and registered them subconsciously. This is going to take careful handling to do. 

Proto isn’t personally bothered by the possibility of Higaki being either gay or bisexual and having a crush on him. These things happen, and Proto was built to be attractive to humans for various reasons. But this is not a good idea, not only because there are regulations against fraternization at Section 9, but because of the power dynamic. Proto is Higaki’s superior, his current mentor and sometime instructor, and his decision could mean the difference between Higaki earning a permanent position at Section 9, and being sent back to the prefectural police. No, it’s flattering, but it’s not something Proto can or would even consider. 

The difficulty here isn’t so much in telling Higaki he knows and isn’t interested, as much as doing so without one: accidentally outing him, in case he isn’t out, and two: doing so without hurting too many of his feelings. In the end, Proto decides to be gentle but direct. He waits after the end of the seminar and notices Higaki waiting for him to leave first, and does not. Instead, he trips the locks on the door shortly after Togusa, the third-last person to leave, heads out. Higaki makes a show of gathering up his notes, which he strictly doesn’t need to take, because he, like Proto, makes a habit of recording seminars and other classes using the recording functions in his prosthetic eyes. 

“Higaki,” Proto says, apropos of nothing, “I’ve noticed you’ve been avoiding my gaze lately. I want to check in with you and see if I’ve done something wrong.” He says that as he collects his sketchbook, gets up, and crosses the floor to stand in front of the desk where Higaki is seated. 

“Um.” Higaki looks down at the notepad on the table, as though its cover is immensely interesting. “No. I don’t think so.”

“I’ve just locked the door from outside, in case you’re worried someone is going to walk in on us while we’re talking, and nobody’s going to hear us if we talk over cybercomm,” Proto says silently, sending directly to Higaki on an encrypted channel. “And anything you wish to tell me now will remain confidential between us. I promise.” 

Higaki does not look up, nor does he respond, and Proto wonders if he’s pushed too hard. And then he breaks the mental silence. “I’ve been trying not to look at you because I feel as though I can’t look away.”

“I’ve noticed,” Proto says speechlessly, “but you understand, I’m not only your instructor but also your superior, which is why nothing can happen between us even if I were interested.”

“No, I understand that,” Higaki says with a sad little laugh. “Which is why I’ve been trying not to look at you, I guess.”

“I’m glad you do,” Proto says, and then considers. “You’re not alone at Section 9, by the way,” he adds.

“In having a crush on you?” Higaki asks, but the levity fails, sounds more bleak instead.

“No,” Proto says very quietly, “not that.”

It takes Higaki a few seconds to find his way back to words, after that. “... oh,” he breathes mentally, “That’s a relief.”

“I can’t tell you who else, of course, these are things told to me in confidence,” Proto says, thinking of Reiko and Saito both. “But you’re not alone, and before you ask, I don’t have a problem with you being gay or bisexual. Neither does the Chief, not that I’ve told him about you. We’re not going to fire you for being queer, either.”

Higaki sags, the taut tension in his spine giving way to weariness, the first hints of relief, as he rests his weight on his elbows, which are propped up on the desk before him. “That’s even more of a relief. But the way you say it, it’s as though you’re not including yourself in the category? If you don’t mind my asking, sir.”

“I’ve been told I dress too well on formal days to be entirely straight, I know,” Proto says, taking no offense at the question whatsoever. “That’s because I don’t know if I’ve had enough time to figure out attraction, yet. I may never do so. It’s not something I worry myself about.”

Higaki nods soberly. “I wish sometimes I wasn’t attracted to people. Especially you.”

“Would it make you more comfortable if I took Reiko back and sent you off to Batou?” Proto suggests. “You’ve improved greatly in the past two weeks, so much so that I don’t think he’d have that much to complain about, if you returned to his mentorship.”

Higaki meets Proto’s gaze for the first time in days, his expressions all painfully readable, but there’s a conviction behind that vulnerability and suppressed emotion. “No. No, I very much like you as a mentor and I’d like to think I’m smart and professional enough to know what not to do.” 

“That’s good, then,” Proto says. Higaki is an adult and ultimately the only one who can decide what is best for himself. “But if you ever need to change things up, tell me. I can’t be a good mentor to you if you don’t tell me when things aren’t working.”

“Thank you, Proto, sir. For understanding,” Higaki says.

“You’re welcome,” Proto says, but he waits, because it’s fairly clear Higaki’s still working through his thoughts.

“So it’s okay if … I decide to see someone?” Higaki asks after a few more moments of silence.

Proto shrugs eloquently. “It’s certainly none of our business as long as you’re not breaking the law, violating clearances, or breaching regulations, and you’re sensible enough that I doubt you would do any of that.”

“You have to understand, I knew —” Higaki trails off, then pauses, summons the courage to go on, using his voice this time. “I’ve known since I was thirteen or fourteen. But it’s hard to say anything about it when you have foster parents. I never seemed to stay long-term with any of them, and I just thought if I pretended I was normal I could eventually be normal. I got used to pretending, I guess, especially working for prefectural police. The locker room jokes...” Higaki shrugs, the gesture a slight, habitual minimizing of years’ worth of pain.

“You are normal,” Proto says, softly and sincerely. “And it’s unfair, terribly so, that you would have to pretend to be straight to be seen as normal. But that’s not something you will ever have to worry about here at Section 9, and if anyone gives you any trouble about it, come to me and we’ll sort it out.”

“I guess it’d make sense that you wouldn’t judge. Being an AI and all that.” Proto doesn’t know why he takes this better than he does Reiko’s questions about his thinking. It’s probably because it’s a shrewd assessment — Dr. Asuda has biases, yes, from the society he lives in, and some of those biases may have shown up in Proto’s programming, but Proto is also largely devoid of a lot of the socialization that drives homophobia because he never had a childhood and didn’t spend 18 years of his life being told what is normative. It’s also an acceptance and celebration of his difference, not a questioning thereof. 

“I try not to be judgmental unless you take up two spaces when you park one car,” Proto says, trying to inject some levity in the conversation, not so much because he wants to joke about something so serious, but because he feels that they both need a small break from raw feeling. “Then I’d have to judge you very hard indeed.”

That provokes a sudden, brief laugh, and a few tears, and Higaki smiles in an odd, mixed-up kind of way, nods wordlessly to himself. “It feels kind of good to finally say this out loud to someone. Thank you for listening.”

“Thank you for trusting me,” Proto says, waiting for Higaki to wipe the tears off his face. “Now let’s go get a cup of coffee or something.” He releases the locks mentally, waves in the door’s direction with a casual hand.

— 

Proto is in the elevator heading down to the ground floor to grab himself a konbini lunch when a notification comes up in his head. It’s a general call to Section 9’s field officers, veterans and greenhorns alike. This transmission is an alert, but not on an emergency channel, which means that this is something important but not critical. The Chief speaks shortly after. “Everyone who is in or near the HQ, I need you to report to Briefing Room A immediately. Everyone else who is not currently at the HQ — prepare to receive an audio/video stream.” 

“I’m coming right back, sir,” Proto says. He punches the button for the next floor down, steps out, and catches an elevator right back upstairs, as the other field officers respond in kind. Proto immediately scans the news channels using his constant Net access, aggregating news articles internationally in several languages even as he taps clandestine channels to other Japanese governmental ministries and security agencies. This gives him a good idea of what’s going on by the time he gets to Briefing Room A. 

The Siak Republic is falling, right now. It’s one of the mini-states that popped up in the aftermath of WWIV, with the continued disruption and balkanization of failed states in Europe, South and Central America, and Southeast Asia alike. There is a political science quip with regards to revolutions that can be summed up as such: All revolutionary governments are doomed to become a smaller, meaner, less organized version of what they were overthrowing in the first place. This joke probably derives from Camus — "Toutes les révolutions modernes ont abouti à un renforcement de l'État". Translated, it says “All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.”

The Siak Republic is no exception, having been formed out of what remained of Indonesia following inter-ethnic tensions that exploded into a civil war. Unfortunately for those who chose to throw in their lot with the charismatic General Ka Ram, who promised ethnic minority former citizens a safe haven, the cure eventually became much worse than the disease. Proto watches a video clip straight from an AFP feed as the elevator rises back upstairs, and it’s a gory mess, censored ad hoc with pixelation, because General Ka Ram’s personal guard have started firing into the crowds of civilian protesters outside his personal palace. This is not good. 

Section 9 had been keeping tabs on the geopolitical situation even though the falls of foreign governments are strictly a Section 6 affair, since Section 9 answers to the Ministry of Home Affairs, not the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But foreign affairs often become home affairs when dictators start looking for wealthy Asian countries to seek asylum in. Proto wonders, as the enraged crowds begin to overrun Ka Ram’s guards on the video he is watching, if the Chief has inside information on what Ka Ram is likely to do in this case. 

14 out of Section 9’s 16 current field officers are all assembled in Briefing Room A; the larger of the two, and the one closer to the Chief’s office. Paz and Batou are both absent, out on other business. Nevertheless it’s a bit of a squeeze — the HQ is going to need to expand into the unused floors buffering Section 9 from the businesses occupying the lower half of this building if Section 9 continues to recruit, which it will. 

Reiko waves Proto over to the row she’s sitting at — she’s seated right beside Soga, who scoots over one seat so that she can move in to accommodate Proto right on the end, and they all wait, tense, expectant, for the Chief to come in. “The Siak Republic’s falling,” Proto murmurs to Reiko, “that’s what this meeting is about, I think.”

“You’ve got the information even before the broadsheets do, neat trick,” Reiko whispers back to him. “I was checking on the net and nothing local has updated yet.”

“I’ve accesses on AFP and Reuters servers that journalists upload to via sat-link before the agency can vet, assess and disseminate what they’ve received,” Proto says, continuing his explanation to her speechlessly, because the Chief has just entered the room. “It’s a trick Azuma taught me, and it’s useful in keeping the Chief updated.” Azuma, with his background in military intelligence, is surprisingly adept at getting the local news in other countries, before it even becomes international news, and Proto has appropriated several of the methods he uses.

And then even Proto’s thoughts fall silent, as the Chief begins to speak. “As an hour ago,” Chief Aramaki says, “General Ka Ram ordered the Siak Republic military to fire upon civilian protesters. This order was not carried out by all Siak Republic military units. Some have turned and joined the protesters after Ka Ram’s personal guard fired into a crowd assembled outside his official residence.”

An uncensored version of the video Proto accessed earlier comes up on the screen, and Proto feels his face settling into a stony mask in an attempt to hide the indignation and anger he feels at civilians being mistreated. Ka Ram’s personal guard are hard and cruel men, used to oppressing the populace on a whim, but they are not professionals, not really, because it’s obvious to the field officers watching the video — the first shot was fired in panic, at an old woman coming up to remonstrate. The rest of the shots followed in staggered sequence as the rest of the unit began to panic as well, following the protesters’ enraged reactions, and then the shooting continued because, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Such is the case when men like that find themselves on the other side of an opposing force that can and will fight back.

There are dozens of civilians dead — Proto cannot bring himself to check his count of the numbers — and Ka Ram’s personal guard won’t last very much longer either, because you can kill some of your populace, but you can’t kill every single one of them, not without rather more infrastructure and preparation and manpower than what the General has at his disposal right now. Moreover, Proto has heard rumors via the Chief that Ka Ram is ailing — very sick with cardiovascular and kidney ailments, and his son Colonel Ka Gael is a wastrel given to luxury and petty vendettas, and completely inadequate to either reform or subjugate the Siak Republic’s authoritarian government in turn.

Ka Gael will flee with his father into exile, Proto thinks, or die trying to do so. 

“Fuuck,” Soga breathes very, very softly, at the carnage he’s seeing. This is personal territory for Soga — the land mine he stepped on, that resulted in his cyberization, had been in the former Indonesia. He had been assigned to a UN peacekeeping force at the time, before he had decided to try out for the Rangers. Soga doesn’t talk about it much, but Proto knows from his psych profile that he witnessed the aftermaths of atrocities and was psychologically traumatized by those even before his maiming; he just copes well enough with his personal damage in the day-to-day that it’s not a barrier to recruitment at Section 9.

Reiko, watching Soga’s reactions and body language, reaches out and gives him a squeeze on the shoulder, her nails digging into the flesh beneath his t-shirt until the slight pain grounds him and helps him return to the present. Reiko isn’t privy to the information Proto has on Soga’s background but she probably recognizes a flashback when she sees one, either from her experience as a medical intern or from her time with the JASDF. Proto notes the quiet, graceful support she offers without making a fuss about it.

“I have received confirmed reports that General Ka Ram has left Siak Republic airspace on a private jet with a few of his hand-picked men, his son Colonel Ka Gael among them, just fifteen minutes ago.” the Chief continues. “He is right now negotiating with the present administration for asylum in Japan. They’ll be permitted to land, refuel, and resupply, in any event. Their estimated ETA is about 7 hours. We anticipate others from his administration fleeing to our shores whether or not he is granted asylum here.” 

There’s a small murmur of dissent and distaste at the notion that such a man would choose to flee to Japan, especially because many of the undocumented refugees in Japan were driven here by his cruelty to his own people. But Proto weighs the situation realistically. Any nation choosing not to take the exiled Ka Ram and his men would open themselves up to blackmail via terrorist retaliation, because that’s what horrible petty dictators like that do. “Sir,” Proto says, speaking up, “he’s threatening the Kayabuki administration with vengeance if we don’t take him in, isn’t he?”

“Indeed he is,” the Chief confirms. “This is not technically our jurisdiction yet — not until Ka Ram arrives in Japanese airspace. But I am putting everyone on elevated alert in case Prime Minister Kayabuki turns him down. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Proto says, and he is echoed in staggered order by the other field officers sitting here. 

“Dismissed,” the Chief says, “except for you, Proto, I need you to put on a suit. You’re coming with me to the Prime Minister’s office. Higaki, you too.” 

“Understood, sir,” they both say. 

—

“What should I do in front of the Prime Minister?” Higaki asks Proto, as they change out of their casuals into slightly more respectable clothing, and Proto notices out the corner of his eye that Higaki is still trying not to stare. So he stands halfway behind his open locker door to make it easier for Higaki not to look, because there’s no point in making everyone unnecessarily uncomfortable. 

“Really, stand there and keep your mouth shut while the Chief talks,” Proto says, because it’s all that’s ever been required of him in her presence. “She’s not a fierce or overbearing person, though, and she can be surprisingly informal if she’s consulting privately with Chief Aramaki. I like her.”

“I always thought she’d be stern,” Higaki says, “sort of distant, you know. Not exactly cruel, but not what you’d call likeable either.”

Proto finishes buttoning up his cotton voile shirt, this one pinstriped in a soft, foggy gray, and tucks it into his trousers. “She has to be. Any woman in her position has to work twice as hard to be taken half as seriously. Look at her historical counterparts, like Margaret Thatcher. You can actually track the masculinization of Thatcher’s persona and in her voice, as the months go by in her term as Prime Minister. Not that Kayabuki is as horrible a human being as Thatcher was.”

“Does she know about you?” Higaki asks.

“Yes, actually,” Proto says, as he starts buttoning up his waistcoat. “It’s never mattered to her, though.”

“Which is probably why you like her,” Higaki says with a little laugh.

“Mostly, yes,” Proto says as he pulls his shoulder holster back on. “She’ll have my vote in the next election, if she doesn’t screw this up.” He grabs a violet knit silk tie that he has kept rolled up in his coat pocket and unrolls it, flips his collar up to put it on using a four-in-hand knot, because other knots are too formal for a knit tie. Then he flips his collar back down, puts on his coat, and shuts the locker door before he reaches behind his neck to free most of the length of his hair from the collar of his shirt. 

Higaki is standing by his locker, staring silently at Proto’s transformation.

“Is everything okay?” Proto asks, just to make sure.

Higaki shakes his head, glances down at his own white shirt and charcoal-colored suit, which he wears well, certainly better than Togusa wears his. It’s an off-rack, but he’s actually gone to an alterations tailor and had it altered to fit him better, which is something many other men don’t bother to do. Perhaps Takumi is right about how queer men tend to care more about how they dress. “I’m fine. You just don’t look like the same person any more.” 

“I’ll pass the compliment on to my tailor,” Proto says, remembering that tonight is another izakaya night. He wonders what Takumi will have to say about the news he’s about to see. He’ll send Takumi a message about his availability closer to 5 or 6PM, he thinks; when he has a better idea if he’ll be stuck in emergency meetings all evening. 

There’s a helo ready on the helipad by the time Proto and Higaki make it upstairs from the locker room, and the Chief is waiting silently by, his seamed face turned away from the rotor-driven updraft. Proto boards first and extends a hand down to Chief Aramaki, to help him on board, and Higaki climbs up under his own steam. They sit, the both of them, facing the Chief as the helo takes off for the Prime Minister’s offices in Fukuoka, and Proto provides Higaki with some context over cybercomm. 

“This is probably going to be an emergency Cabinet meeting,” Proto explains to Higaki. “This means lots of security, very few ancillary staff besides senior secretaries, which is what I do when I accompany the Chief on such meetings. You’re there to learn from both myself and the Chief what emergency policy meetings are like, and what Cabinet meetings are like in general, so don’t worry about not having anything to contribute. This is more of an observation situation than anything else.” 

“Right,” Higaki says, slowly. “Why am I being shown so early what these meetings are like?”

“I came by my current position as Chief Aramaki’s aide after we ran into a staffing shortage issue last year, with various field officers unavailable or in hospital. As an AI, I have some advantages in that department, so the Chief made it official. But before then he would take Togusa with him to such meetings.” Proto leaves out the pertinent fact that the Major herself would sit in on these meetings whenever she was available, but that’s not really relevant to Higaki or the way Section 9 is being run right now, since she is no longer part of the organization. “Togusa is now our field commander, so he has other responsibilities to fulfil. In the event that both Togusa and I are unavailable, the Chief would need to appoint someone temporarily as aide and bodyguard. That means training you and the other novices early to know what to do in such situations. Life is unpredictable, and our lives specifically are even more so.”

“That makes sense.” Higaki says. He’s a lot better about holding a cybercomm conversation without looking like he’s currently chatting with someone mentally than Reiko is.

“As a tiny privilege,” Proto explains further, “the Prime Minister will probably allow you to wait inside the meeting room, probably to the right of the door with her own security detail to the left, instead of waiting outside with everyone else’s security staff. That’s because Section 9 is more combat-capable than the Cabinet’s own security apparatus in the event of an unexpected emergency, which I honestly do not anticipate this afternoon. It’s also because we’re currently in her good graces presently after the mess with the Cabinet Intelligence Service last year. It’s a message she’s still sending to the Cabinet ministers. I will be standing by the Chief’s chair to pass him information or data he requires. You’ll probably be bored senseless, because it’s routine to run a defensive barrier maze and signal jammer to prevent electronic eavesdropping of the meeting. Which means very limited Net access. You can talk to me over cybercomm if you’re bored, I multitask better than a human secretary can. That’s all the protocol you probably need to know right now, so don’t worry. Just pretend you forgot your homework and have to stand in the hallway outside your classroom, and everything will go fine. Unless things don’t, then listen for the Chief’s or my instructions and do as we say.”

“Yes, sir,” Higaki says. 

—

Tonight’s dinner gets cancelled to Takumi’s general disappointment, although he accepts Proto’s lack of explanation for the last-minute cancellation with good grace. It’s something Proto has always liked about Takumi as a friend — how easily he accepts and understands that there are things Proto can’t tell him. Instead, he and the Chief and Higaki wait in a private lounge in the Diet Building and eat makunouchi bento meals delivered by a two-star Fukuoka restaurant that provides the food whenever the Cabinet has a working lunch meeting. 

These specific bento boxes are packed with delightful emphasis on the summer and its seasonal delicacies, as well as Fukuoka’s own regional specialties. There’s a fat slice of tamagoyaki filled with a creamy center of pollock roe, a filet of horse mackerel fried and served with a dressing of garlic, green onions, and sesame oil. There are bites of miso-grilled eggplant, a small mound of spicy-salty edamame, and a half-moon of bitter gourd stuffed with minced fish, along with inch-long segments of garlic scapes that have been blanched and served in a tangy soy-vinegar sauce. It’s all very elaborate and attractive to the eye, which makes Proto feel a bit bad that he’s hungry enough that he hasn’t spent that much time appreciating the way it looks. 

But it all tastes very good, which calms him and puts him in a better mood for what is to come.

“Which way do you think Prime Minister Kayabuki is leaning, sir?” Proto asks the Chief silently, on an encrypted channel, after they’ve eaten. Proto is aware that the Chief has been conferring privately with the Prime Minister over cybercomm during the two and a half hours of their meeting, even while the Cabinet ministers have dithered and disagreed over the best course of action. 

One or two of them might even have dared to accuse Prime Minister Kayabuki as a weak-willed woman, but the arrest and dethronement of Chief Cabinet Secretary Takakura last January has given most of them pause for the time being, and her opponents lack a unifying drive. 

“I think she will allow Ka Ram to stay on Japanese soil,” the Chief thinks at Proto. “But it will not be an unconditional offer of asylum.”

“No,” Proto agrees, “not when she’s asking us to handle the security arrangements for the General’s arrival. Is there any truth to the rumors that he is very ill?”

“He won’t allow his sickness to show,” the Chief indicates, “even if he is, so we might not get to the bottom of that question now.”

“True enough,” Proto says. “Higaki, what’s your opinion on the situation?”

Higaki looks up, a tiny bit startled that his opinions would be considered important enough to share with the Chief, but that’s exactly why he’s here at Section 9 — because his viewpoint brings balance to their membership as a whole. “If I were in charge, sir, Chief,” Higaki says, recovering smoothly from his surprise, “I’d probably bundle Ka Ram off to a protected location offshore — still in our territorial waters, but private, at least until we figure out what else to do with him.”

“I concur,” Proto says. “I’d even couch it as a rest cure for the stress he’s suffered in the past 24 hours, a soothing temporary retreat in a sumptuous villa somewhere, and then quietly cut off his means of communication with the world, so he can’t foment terrorism that we can be blamed for as a nation.”

The Chief nods, glancing from Higaki to Proto, a brief, satisfied smile spreading across his face. “That’s almost exactly what I suggested to the Prime Minister. Of course his son Ka Gael would be permitted to visit him occasionally to guarantee his continued health… but we would record his activities from wherever we have lodged him. That is, of course, all conditionally based on Prime Minister Kayabuki’s decision. I suspect we’ll hear more about it once everyone has returned from this late lunch recess.”

“Is there a suitable place to put him, sir?” Higaki asks the Chief.

“Yes,” the Chief says, “albeit at the cost of some half a billion yen to the taxpayer — Batou’s vetting the place right now with Ishikawa and Borma assisting, while Togusa assembles a team to cover security when Ka Ram lands. It’s naturally not a popular choice with the Minister of Defense, who wants to shake the money loose from our subsidiary budget.”

Both Proto and Higaki shake their heads and share a cynical look between them. “That’s a mere fraction of the cost of one of those new destroyers the JMSDF wants built, why not ask them for the money?” Proto asks facetiously, if only because that might be a bridge too far for this Cabinet. 

“That’s all rather a lot of money to spend on a man who’s basically blackmailing us into letting him stay on our soil,” Higaki muses. “‘At the moment of my death,’” he says, quoting a televised speech given at Ka Ram’s departure from the Siak Republic, “‘I will reap terror upon the world.’ That’s not exactly a humble request for admittance.”

“No, it’s not exactly small change,” Proto agrees, “but half a billion yen is what gets lost in the JSDF’s couch cushions over a fiscal year. The Minister of Defense is just dicking around, pardon my language, Chief, because he resents the fact that the Prime Minister trusts us more than she would Section 4, which would be his first choice for security.”

“Language, Proto!” the Chief says with mock horror, and then they all burst out laughing. It’s a good laugh, one that breaks the tension of the afternoon. Proto’s general avoidance of foul language is almost a trademark at Section 9, especially among the saltier-mouthed field officers such as Batou and occasionally Togusa.

It’s not as though Proto is too well-mannered to swear — there are times where he has felt the urge to vent his emotions with a well-chosen stream of profanity. But swear words just feel oddly superfluous and useless to him. Why not save his time and energy correcting the situation, rather than yelling at things as they stand? That’s why he doesn’t swear, in general. This, however, is warranted, if only because he isn’t sure if there’s a more concise way to describe the Minister of Defense’s current stratagem.

Higaki glances up from his can of green tea, after they’ve all calmed down. “Section 4, they’re the Rangers. That’s Soga’s old unit, he mentioned it to me.”

“Batou’s from the Rangers too, you can tell, the prosthetic eyes,” Proto says, because it’s not something that’s immediately obvious to someone who hasn’t had a chance to see the Rangers in action. That’s not something even Proto has seen first hand, given that he spent most of that time slowly dying in an office downstairs in this very building during that particular incident. It’s not really a common experience, all told, because even the people the Rangers are neutralizing don’t generally see them coming.

— 

General Ka Ram is sick, Proto can tell at a glance as the man comes down the stairs from his private jet, although it would not be obvious to other bystanders, not exactly. He walks steadily on his own feet, sure enough, and his cheeks are a ruddy pink, but Proto notes the beads of sweat creeping down from his hairline and the faint yellowish tinge to his sclera. Ka Ram’s pupils are enlarged, despite the intense artificial light he has just stepped out into, which indicates that he’s probably drugged. An opiate, Proto thinks, because tranquilizers cause miosis, or shrunken pupils. 

It’s probably cancer or congestive heart failure, Proto suspects, with comorbidities that make cyberization a bad idea, probably cirrhosis of the liver or adjacent kidney issues, something with enough vascular complications that prosthetics would only stress his body more than it already has been. 

Proto is standing very quietly by Chief Aramaki, his coat left off to reveal the shoulder holster he carries his sidearm in every waking moment of his day. This is because Ka Ram’s private jet has been diverted from its original destination, Fukuoka Airport, to the JASDF base in Kyogamisaki, near Kyoto. This is ostensibly to spare Ka Ram the offense of being photographed by the Japanese press, but also because it’s much easier to contain a situation here on a military airbase instead of in a civilian international airport. There are no civilians around to alarm besides the Prime Minister and the Minister of Home Affairs, and neither of them is especially bothered by the sight of a Section 9 field officer carrying his sidearm openly. 

Proto is also wearing an armored vest discreetly under his shirt and waistcoat, in case things do go wronger than usual and he has to stand in the line of fire, as the American Empire Secret Service would put it. But he honestly doubts that is going to happen, if only because Section 9 has also deployed in full force. Higaki has joined the other rookies in suiting up fully, and Togusa has also made the decision to deploy the Uchikomas, whose built-in LMGs could reduce Ka Ram and his entourage to a shredded, pulpy mess in a matter of minutes. 

It’s a bold choice the General is making, taking his first step into exile on his own, without his cronies or bodyguards preceding him. But then it’s not as though he’s entirely powerless in this situation. Proto picks out the elaborate tattoos on the palms of the men following Ka Ram, as Prime Minister Kayabuki takes a single step forward. Proto’s augmented vision magnifies what he sees, and the image comes immediately up on his search of an international counterterror database. The script reads “True Believer”, the mark of one of Ka Ram’s chosen loyalists. Each and every one of these men is a trained terrorist, even Ka Ram’s son, Ka Gael, included, and those are only the ones who can afford to show their allegiance. There are no doubt more hidden in cells in Japan and in other nations worldwide, as a kind of insurance policy meant to pressure Prime Minister Kayabuki out of arresting Ka Ram and turning him over to the Hague. 

Batou steps up beside the Prime Minister, his arm extended to her as she steps forward on the rain-slick runway. He’s holding an umbrella to cover her, just as Proto is holding an umbrella to shield the Chief from the drizzle, which is convenient, as it places the both of them right by their principals in this moment. The principal is what operators call the people they’re defending when assigned to executive protection duty. Batou is dressed in an immaculate storm-colored wool suit, the fabric a tad heavy for this weather, and beads of moisture sit on top of the flannel’s nap and shimmer in the spotlights set up for the General’s arrival. 

“You’re not boarding me here in the barracks, are you, Yoko?” Ka Ram asks Prime Minister Kayabuki, his smile deathly, sickly and faintly insolent. His Japanese is excellent, his accent barely there, but then he’d always preferred to send the many children of his various mistresses to Japanese boarding schools, over the years.

Kayabuki keeps her face pleasant despite Ka Ram’s over-familiar use of her first name, but the lines by her eyes tighten just a hint. “No,” she says evenly. “But I thought you would appreciate the added privacy and security of landing somewhere inaccessible to the press or the general public.” 

“No need to pretend, woman,” Ka Ram says, his tone remarkably dry and pleasant despite the tension in the air. “It would also be far easier to make me vanish here, if that was also your intention… and I would be pleased even if that was the case, seeing as you’ve chosen Aramaki as your hatchet man.” Ka Ram laughs, an unpleasant, phlegmy noise coming from the depths of his chest. “You’ve risen a long way from the ranks, Daisuke,” Ka Ram says almost conversationally, in the Chief’s direction.

“As have you, General,” Chief Aramaki says, easily. 

Ka Ram glances at Proto first, and then at Batou, who lifts his chin in silent defiance. Ka Gael pushes his way to the front of Ka Ram’s gaggle of men and Proto’s sense of time begins to slow as his enhanced reflexes kick in. Batou, too, begins to step forward, and the both of them stand between the Prime Minister and the Chief, and Ka Gael. Behind them, Paz pulls the Minister of Home Affairs discreetly behind Borma and reaches into his coat, does not withdraw his hand. 

The long object Ka Gael is fumbling with is an umbrella — but it could very well be a disguised single-shot zip gun. The ferrule of the umbrella rises, rises and hangs for a half-second in the air, pointed at Proto’s heart, before Ka Gael gives him an unpleasant grin and pops it open, to shield his father from the rain. 

“Nasty little shit,” Batou comments on cybercomm. 

“Indeed,” Proto agrees, given that you would have to be suicidal to play armed chicken with Section 9 field officers working exec protect duty. That or so coddled and protected from the consequences of your actions that you don’t realize you could have just started a major international incident. It’s probably the latter in Ka Gael’s case, given the psych profile JSDF intelligence has supplied Section 9. Proto accesses Saito’s Hawkeye program briefly in observer mode, just for the oversight, and notes from telemetry that Saito has put 800g of pressure on the 1.2kg trigger of his customized Seburo SR-50 rifle. Ka Gael is a hair’s breadth away from having his brains blown out in spectacular style.

“Weapons tight,” the Chief says wordlessly, and Proto watches the numbers change in his augmented vision as Saito takes his finger slowly off the trigger of his rifle. 

“If you’ll come this way, General,” Chief Aramaki says, almost genially, “my men will escort you to your private villa.”

Ka Ram takes the umbrella from Ka Gael then, and nods to his son and what remains of his cadre, and walks stiffly, pridefully towards the Section 9 tiltrotor that will take him further into exile.


End file.
